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TEACHERS COLLEGE LECTURES 
ON THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 

Series I 



THE 
MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 



BY 

CHARLES REYNOLDS BROWN 

AUTHOR OF 
"the cap and gown," *' FAITH AND HEALTH," 

"the young man's affairs," etc. 



TEACHERS COLLEGE 

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 

NEW YORK CITY 

1911 



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y,(. 



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Copyright, 191 1, by 
Teachers College, Columbia University 



;Ci.A289710 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 



I Truth and Life 3 

II The Worth of Incomplete 

Knowledge 32 

III A Deepening Experience .... 66 

IV The Practical Use of the Bible . 98 
V Fellowship through Service . .132 



INTRODUCTION 

Through the aid of generous friends, it was 
possible to arrange for the addresses now 
included in this volume. Neither the ad- 
dresses themselves nor the topics with which 
they deal were arranged for without careful 
thought and without a definite purpose in 
view. From both teachers and students alike 
had come many requests for an opportunity 
to hear a new and fresh statement of some of 
the fundamental principles of religion. In 
the break-up of conventional ideas which has 
been so marked a characteristic of the gene- 
ration in which we live, many intelligent men 
and women have lost the clue to the meaning 
of religion and to its significance for human 
life. They have been led hither and yon 
by strange and often superficial teachings 
which frequently confused without enlight- 
ening. These addresses, by a consummate 



viii INTRODUCTION 

master of the art of expression and by a 
religious teacher of vigorous and indepen- 
dent mind, are offered as a corrective to 
teachings of another kind. 

It has been the good fortune of Columbia 
University to be a pioneer in many fields. It 
has had the courage and the foresight to ad- 
vance on to new ground when advance was 
needed and to stand fast by old principles 
when steadfastness was required. In setting 
aside a portion of the academic day in order 
that teachers and students may assemble to 
listen to these addresses on religious prin- 
ciples and religious truth, the Dean and 
Faculty of Teachers College have performed 
a new and not inconsiderable service. 

There is a fashionable affectation, often 
offensively manifested, that religion is super- 
stition, religious service idolatry, and re- 
ligious discussion futile. To those who are 
so unfortunate as to be in the grasp of an 
affectation like this, the careful reading pf 
these addresses is earnestly commended. 

Nicholas Murray Butler. 



THE 
MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 



I 

TRUTH AND LIFE 

IN arranging with me for this course of 
lectures, the Dean of Teachers College 
indicated clearly and emphatically that his 
chief desire was "not to have presented a his- 
tory of religion, or a philosophy of religion, 
or some particular system of religious dogma 
or ecclesiastical method/' He wished rather 
'^to have set forth in direct fashion rehgion 
itself as an experience, as a life— a life to be 
lived under modern conditions of thought 
and action/' 

I could enter readily and heartily into that 
desire, for to me the most interesting thing 
about religion is not the history of it, nor the 
philosophy of it, nor this or that particular 
system of doctrine or polity. I am interested 
mainly in religion as a life, a life to be lived 
more effectively and joyously because of the 
stimulus, the guidance, and the reinforce- 

3 



4 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

ment which a real religious faith offers. In 
this first lecture, therefore, I wish to say 
something to you about truth and life. 

You find men to whom the truth is always 
a statement to be written out and printed in 
a book for other people to read. ''Here is 
the truth,'' they say, ''study it; memorize it; 
and in the great day of examination thou 
shalt be saved/' 

You find those to whom the truth is always 
a tool, the use of which is to be mastered. It 
can be set to dig or to build, to heal or to 
plead, to instruct or co preach, and thus made 
to yield a financial return. "Here is the 
truth," they say, "master the use of it and it 
will put money in thy purse." 

You find those to whom the truth is always 
a picture to be framed and hung up for the 
admiration of beholders. "Here is the 
truth," they say, "learn to enjoy it as a man 
of culture and thou shalt be numbered with 
the elite." 

The abstract, the commercial, and the 
decorative idea of knowledge, each one takes 
its turn at the bat ; each one has its way with 
us at some period of our development; and 
each one fails to score when the game is 



TRUTH AND LIFE 



finally reckoned up because each one deals 
only with that which is secondary. 

The primary office of knowledge is to 
make men alive. It is designed to send them 
out alive at more points, alive on higher lev- 
els, alive in more effective ways. The highest 
reward for gaining an education comes not 
in the sense of having more information on a 
certain subject than your neighbors possess; 
it comes not in the fact that now you can go 
into the market and sell your efforts at a 
higher figure than uneducated persons can 
do; it comes not in the privileged possession 
of that subtle and altogether admirable some- 
thing we call culture. The highest reward 
comes in an enlarged capacity to live. If 
your college course makes you as a person 
destined to live with other persons more 
thoroughly, abundantly, and usefully alive, 
it has done its work. This is primary, be- 
cause the ultimate value of knowledge lies in 
its power to minister to life. 

I can best illustrate this in a concrete case. 
During the last six months we have been 
reading a great deal in the papers and maga- 
zines about a man whose name was William 
James. He is dead, to our great sorrow, for 



6 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

he was Professor o£ Philosophy in Harvard 
University, and he was a philosopher in a 
thousand. He merited all that has been said 
about him. He was a standing rebuke to the 
definition given of metaphysics by a certain 
wag. I do not quote the remark approvingly 
and would not venture to quote it at all were 
I not a lover of philosophy myself, having 
invested much time in hard and rewarding 
study along that line. ''When some man 
talks about what he does not understand,'/ 
the wag said, ''to a lot of people who do not 
understand him, about something that would 
not make a particle of difference to any of 
them if they did understand it, that is meta- 
physics.'' It indicates in a rough way a cer- 
tain popular, though mistaken attitude to- 
ward certain brands of philosophy. 

William James was an effective reply to 
that whole line of criticism. He always 
knew what he was talking about. He used 
the English language in such a way, with 
such charm and clearness, that other people 
understood him. And what he said did make 
a difference. He used to say with the great- 
est emphasis, "There is no difference worth 
discussing which does not make a difference 



TRUTH AND LIFE 



in conduct/'— that is to say, in life. He gave 
much of his best strength latterly to what 
is called ''pragmatism/' and the word prag- 
matism is simply a technical term to indicate 
that the ''truth works'' and finds its main 
^justification, perhaps, in the fact that it does 
work and that in the great outcome it is the 
only thing that will work. The honored 
Harvard professor was forever striving to 
bring his philosophy into immediate contact 
with life and thus compel it to assert its value 
in terms of improved experience. The pri- 
mary thing with him was the direct bearing 
of truth on life. 

Now all this applies with special force to 
religious truth. Religion has come that we 
might have life and that we might have it 
more abundantly. He that hath religion hath 
life on wider areas and on higher levels. He 
that hath not religion hath not life. The 
final word of religion in the best known and 
most popular of all the parables, the parable 
of the good Samaritan, was, "This do and 
thou shalt live." The sublime reaction from 
the attempt to love God with all the heart 
and one's neighbor as well as one's self, 
would be found, the Author of the parable 



8 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

said, in an increased power to live. The ulti- 
mate value of religious truth lies in its power 
to minister to life. 

We wonder sometimes why the term '^ec- 
clesiastical" and the term "academic'^ are 
uttered nine times out of ten as terms of 
reproach. ''He is merely an ecclesiastic/' 
men say, as if that disposed of him. "His 
knowledge of the subject is purely aca- 
demic," they say, as if that were sufficient 
reason for not entering his name in the trial 
balance, — it would not affect the result. The 
church and the school are respectable institu- 
tions yet "ecclesiastical" and "academic" are 
commonly terms of reproach. May it not be 
for the reason that what we sometimes teach 
from the pulpit or from the chair does so 
often fail to relate itself in helpful fashion 
to life that, in consequence, the big outside 
world where things are done has fallen into 
a way of stamping much of our output as 
dry and fruitless ? 

There was once a great Teacher who has 
come by common consent to be widely called 
"The Master." His work was a full-page, 
life-size illustration of the direct bearing of 
truth upon life. He gave His first lecture in 



TRUTH AND LIFE 



a little synagogue at Nazareth. He then 
appeared in the larger temple at Jerusalem. 
He then went out o£ doors and stood on the 
hillside under the open sky. From the record 
it would seem that four-fifths of all His 
work was done in the open air. He went 
there because the people were there, the great 
main movements of life were there, the vital 
concerns of ordinary existence were there, 
and He was intent upon relating His truth to 
the common life. He was unwilling to re- 
main apart with a little, inner, select circle, 
allowing the great, main, secular interests of 
the world go their way untaught, unre- 
newed, and unblessed by the truths of the 
religion He came to establish. 

The sentence which precedes the Sermon 
on the Mount is quite as significant as any 
sentence contained in the address itself. 
''Seeing the multitudes, He went up into a 
mountain and opened His mouth and taught 
them.'' That is to say. His teaching was 
called out by the immediate appeal of life. 

It was the sight of that multitude, not 
merely so many square rods of human beings 
such as one might see gathered together on 
the Fourth of July or on Labor Day, but that 



lo THE MODERN MAN^S RELIGION 

array of hopes and fears, of yearnings and 
longings, of sorrows and sins, — it was that 
mass of human need which kindled the heart 
and loosened the tongue of this Teacher pos- 
sessed of sympathetic insight. Seeing the 
multitudes and thinking of all that was hid- 
den away in those many hearts, recognizing 
the undeclared and unrealized capacity in 
waiting deep down in the lives of all those 
people, He was moved to speak. He went up 
on the hillside and taught them. His message 
was called out directly by the appeal of life. 
More than that, when you come to read it 
you find that the Sermon on the Mount is not 
a history of religion, nor a philosophy of 
religion, nor a rigid system of dogma. It 
shows in every line of it that it took shape 
and form in the immediate presence of life. 
His every word bore directly on some neces- 
sary problem of human life. He addressed 
Himself to the needs of those who hungered 
after righteousness, who wanted to obtain 
mercy, who wished to stand in right relations 
with their fellows, vv^ho longed to know the 
truth about prayer and eternal life, who 
desired that they might see God. It may be 
that this is the reason why He is called 'The 



TRUTH AND LIFE ii 

Master/'— among all the instructors of the 
race He stands at the head of the list in 
relatinp* truth to life. 

What a tremendous difference it would 
have made in human progress if all the great 
religious pronouncements had been thus 
wrought out in the immediate presence of 
life! For example, when the Athanasian 
Creed was shaped up no one was present ex- 
cept a company of learned, dry-as-dust theo- 
logians. If they had enjoyed the presence 
and the counsel of a half dozen clear-headed 
business men, or a few bright women with 
their keener intuitions, that celebrated Creed 
might not have been quite so repellent. 

When the Westminster Confession of 
Faith was framed, the work was done by a 
body of mature men shut up for five years 
within the walls of Westminster Abbey. It 
is no milk-and-water affair. It undertakes 
to be the most logical, fundamental, and ex- 
plicit setting forth of man's relations to his 
Maker anywhere contained in the great 
creedal statements of Christendom. The men 
who made it were wise and learned and 
godly,— there is no manner of doubt about 
that. But when you read their utterance in 



12 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

the famous old Confession it does not seem 
like an instrument framed up in the presence 
of the real needs of the human heart. 

If a multitude had been present on that 
occasion also, if some little children even had 
been playing over at one side or looking up 
timidly into the faces of their mothers, some- 
what frightened by the sight of so much 
theological learning, that section about the 
damnation of non-elect infants might never 
have gotten in. If a half dozen boys had 
been somewhere in sight with the bubble, the 
promise, and the mystery of healthy youth, 
those dear old men would have limbered up 
some of the joints of the Confession in spite 
of themselves. It was a creed wrought out, 
it would seem, to satisfy the demands of 
logic or to match an imposing array of skill- 
fully selected proof texts, or to express their 
own metaphysical broodings. It was not 
framed up to face and to meet the normal 
and constantly recurring needs of life, and 
that is its condemnation. 

I have taken this illustration from my own 
particular line of study because I am more 
familiar with that, but the same principle 
holds on many other fields. The truth as 



TRUTH AND LIFE 13 

some man teaches it in the University and as 
some students study it may be kilHngly cor- 
rect viewed in the abstract, or it may be well 
calculated to be a genuine commercial asset 
in the increased earning capacity of the man 
who masters it, or it may be as beautiful to 
look at as a painting by Turner ; but it does 
not stand related in any creative fashion to 
the finer, the deeper, and the more enduring 
interests of life. No master in Israel has 
ever carried it out into the presence of the 
multitude and shown its bearings in such a 
way as to merit the high endorsement, 'This 
know and thou shalt live''; and that is the 
condemnation of any such method. 

''Knowledge is power,'' but only when it is 
knowledge in process of being wrought out 
in terms of life. Men differ widely in the 
amount of information they carry about with 
them,— that is altogether secondary, for the 
information is all there in the encyclopedia 
when we want it, and mere information is 
not power. Men differ widely in the amount 
of technical training they have received,— 
this has value, but it may miss the thing that 
is vital; it often does miss it. Real knowl- 
edge belongs rather to the man trained in 



14 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

sympathetic insight, in real grasp and in the 
habit of concentration. Put such a man 
down anywhere with a book or a problem, 
with a piece of machinery or a difficult situa- 
tion in business, with some exacting task in 
the work of education, or with some hard 
moral struggle, and he will know what to do 
with it. He may or may not be up in that 
particular line, but his trained and knowing 
mind will give him capacity for accomplish- 
ment. He will intelligently set about the 
mastery of that particular job. His whole 
habit of steadily relating truth to life, which 
has become ingrained, will make him com- 
petent to do, to be, and to grow. 

It was never meant that truth and life 
should dwell apart, no, not for an hour. The 
Almighty at the outset joined them together. 
The Master of all the higher values uttered 
His confirmation of this principle when He 
said, 'The words that I speak unto you, they 
are spirit and they are life.'' ''What God 
hath joined together let no man put asun- 
der/' 

Some of the later Greek philosophers were 
wont to speak scornfully of the untaught, 
unwashed herd. "What could they make of 



TRUTH AND LIFE 15 

Plato's 'Republic/ or of Aristotle's 'Prolego- 
mena to Ethics'?'' they said. They insisted 
that philosophy was for the select few. It 
was this separation of sublime truths from 
the interests of common life which made 
such men ''academic." 

Many of the Hindoo teachers seek only to 
make a few select adepts, Brahmins of high 
caste, who may be able to appreciate their 
subtle notions. "This truth of ours is not for 
the many," they say. And this serves to ac- 
count for the wide remove between the 
quality of India's ability along the line of 
philosophical and religious speculation and 
the measure of her ability to live the life of 
genuine aspiration and useful service. 

The scribes and Pharisees in Christ's day 
when they saw the common people following 
Him eagerly and hearing Him gladly, 
sneered. "Have any of the rulers believed 
on Him? This people that knoweth not the 
law are accursed." This was simply a round- 
about and theological way of saying, "The 
common people be accursed !" 

Here in our own land, some college gradu- 
ate, he may be a clergyman or a professor, 
or he may follow any one of a dozen voca- 



i6 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

tions, goes forth perhaps and talks learnedly 
about that which has no particular relation to 
the lives of his fellows, using all the technical 
patois of his own department, throwing in 
great quantities of Latin and Greek deriva- 
tives, and then because the people fail to get 
anything out of it, he decides that ''It is too 
deep for them/' And the people go away 
wondering why learned men are often so 
deadly dull. The fault is in the man in that 
he has not learned the high art of relating 
truth to life. 

The really and truly great things, standing 
in the very first rank, not in the second or 
third, are meant to win their response from 
the many. The beauty of a rainbow or a 
sunset, the grandeur of the ocean in a storm, 
or the quiet peace of some lovely valley, the 
trees, the flowers, and the singing birds, all 
these see the multitudes as Christ did and 
win their response. The cathedral at Co- 
logne and the Sistine Madonna, the oratorio 
of 'The Messiah,'' and the overture to 
"Tannhauser," these are not for the initiated 
alone ; they too are enjoyed by the multitudes. 
It is a misguided mind which hides what it 
has of genuine worth under a bushel of tech- 



TRUTH AND LIFE 17 

nique and then foolishly believes that it is too 
great for the world to be able to receive it. 
The lack is in the man who has not found a 
suitable channel of expression. Rightly ut- 
tered, the best that any department of human 
learning has may win its response from the 
many by relating itself in some helpful 
fashion to the inner life. 

Jesus set His face squarely against the 
notion that religion as He taught it, was a 
subtle, esoteric, mysterious something to be 
appreciated only by the chosen few. ''If any 
man,''— cultured and trained he may be, or 
rude and unlettered,— ''will do the will, he 
shall know the doctrine." His life of trust- 
ful obedience will increase his spiritual in- 
sight and render him competent to make 
voyages of spiritual discovery in his own 
right. 

^'If any man thirst/'— any man, whatever 
his history or particular attainments, — "let 
him come unto Me and drink." However 
great or meager his individual talent may be, 
if he is genuinely athirst for a higher life, let 
him come. He may, he can, take the water 
of life freely. 

Jesus made special and winsome appeal to 



i8 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

those who might feel themselves omitted 
from the privileges of religion at its best. 
The stress of their physical toil and the 
dwarfing effect of severe drudgery might 
seem to have dulled their spiritual capacity. 
But Christ said, ''Come unto Me all ye that 
labor and are heavy laden. Take My yoke 
upon you and learn.'' If they would enlist 
openly in His service, they would inevitably 
find rest unto their souls. It was always His 
way. His word was a universal word. The 
sight of the multitude moved Him to utter 
His best because His truth was meant for the 
common life. 

I have dwelt upon this at some length be- 
cause many people have fallen into the way 
of keeping certain religious convictions apart 
in a kind of safe deposit vault where things 
too valuable for everyday use are commonly 
stored. They know that these sacred con- 
victions are there. They go in on state occa- 
sions, Christmas and Easter, perhaps, and 
look at them. They feel a bit richer because 
they have such beliefs and sentiments locked 
up in that place of security. But they have 
no idea of bringing those religious judg- 
ments out in the broad glare of day or of set- 



TRUTH AND LIFE 19 

ting them to work on the field of ordinary 
action. What a stupid waste of privilege ! 

What difference does it make whether you 
believe or fail to believe in anything unless it 
affects your life? What difference does it 
make whether you regard the story of Jonah 
as history or as parable unless your position 
in the matter affects your life ? What differ- 
ence does it make whether you regard the 
story of Joshua calling upon the sun to stand 
still as prose or as poetry, the hard statement 
of historic fact, or a beautiful reference to 
the idea that the significant events of that 
memorable day seemed to stretch it far 
beyond the limited number of hours assigned 
to it in the almanac ? 

Or, turning from things trivial to things 
vital, what difference does it make whether 
you believe or refuse to believe in the author- 
ity and inspiration of the Bible, in the unique 
character and person of Jesus Christ, unless 
the position you have come to hold issues in 
an altered and improved attitude of life? It 
is the same contention made by the professor 
of philosophy. There is no difference worth 
discussing which does not make a difference 
in life. The chief reason why it is worth 



20 THE MODERN MAN^S RELIGION 

while to study and to strive for carefully con- 
sidered, well-grounded, strongly held convic- 
tions as to religious truth is that they do have 
a direct and powerful bearing upon life. 
Men are actually transformed by the renew- 
ing of their minds. 

We are sometimes taunted with the fact 
that our religious faith in some of its claims 
cannot be demonstrated. Our faith in a di- 
vine Providence where all things work to- 
gether for good to those who are faced right ; 
our faith in the ultimate and transcendent 
effects of prayer ; our faith in immortality- 
no one of these claims, it is said, can be sub- 
mitted to the test of immediate and final 
demonstration and thus proved beyond a 
peradventure to all beholders. We cannot 
go to the blackboard and demonstrate the 
truth of the Christian position in any one of 
these matters as we might prove some propo- 
sition in mathematics. We cannot enter the 
physical laboratory and establish the truth of 
these claims as we might demonstrate certain 
chemical reactions. 

The objection is sound. But neither can 
unbelief at these points be submitted to im- 
mediate and final demonstration. The unbe- 



TRUTH AND LIFE 21 

lievers also are walking by faith and not by 
sight, albeit their faith is a negative faith. 
They are not opposing our faith with their 
knowledge, but simply with a negative form 
of belief which they have chosen to accept. 

The beauty of our faith is that it can be 
successfully lived. It works, and it works 
better than anything else offered. Life be- 
comes more livable, more inspiring, more 
effective when it is caught and held in the 
grip of a great confidence in an all-embrac- 
ing Providence which is steadily serving the 
higher interests of the race and will ulti- 
mately vindicate its course at the bar of 
reason and conscience. Life is more livable 
and more enjoyable when we believe that we 
have power to enter into the shaping of the 
more important spiritual events of the uni- 
verse through faithful and persistent prayer. 
Life is more livable when we live it by the 
power of our confidence in an endless life. 
Our faith can be lived, and when it is thus 
carried into the presence of the multitude 
and applied to the fundamental interests of 
life, it works. 

It is exceedingly important that those who 
are to give the best strength of their lives to 



22 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

the work of teaching, should feel that they 
are standing on firm ground at this point. 
When Bronson Alcott, the Boston transcen- 
dentalist, was living in the town of Concord, 
he strolled one day into the village school. 
According to the custom then prevailing in 
country districts, he was asked to make some 
remarks. He stood up, looking at the chil- 
dren inquiringly with that genuine interest 
he felt in whatever was human — and I sup- 
pose the average schoolroom yields about as 
many bushels to the acre of pure unadul- 
terated human nature as any field to be 
found. The children were also eyeing him, 
wondering what he was going to say, and 
presently beginning to wonder if he intended 
to say anything. Suddenly he burst out, 
''What did you come here for?'' The boys 
and girls exchanged looks of surprise, whis- 
pered and giggled a little, and then the an- 
swer came back from one of the bolder 
spirits,— 'We came to learn.'' 'To learn 
what?" the philosopher asked. Again they 
pondered, and reflected upon those particular 
aspects of pedagogical experience which had 
impressed them most, and the answer came 
back, "To learn to behave." 



TRUTH AND LIFE 23 

Out of the mouths of babes and urchins, 
you know, out of those simple, fearless, child- 
like minds which say just what they think, 
the world adds to its stock of truth. Going 
to school, and the whole pursuit of knowl- 
edge for which the schoolroom stands, has 
several ends in view, but the one central and 
controlling principle in it all is ''to learn to 
behave/' 

By that I do not mean the transformation 
of the ordinary school exercise into a kind of 
preaching service. I do not mean the intro- 
duction of even so much of the spirit of sec- 
tarian propagandism as might creep through 
the crack under the door. I mean that the 
everyday business of teaching children to 
read and write and add up columns of fig- 
ures; I mean that the task of teaching them 
history, literature, geography, and science 
should be held firmly within the grasp of a 
definite moral purpose. The end in view in 
our whole pursuit and disbursement of learn- 
ing is to send out men and women better 
equipped to behave wisely, honestly, and use- 
fully. The high task of education carried on 
in the schoolroom, or in the college, or in that 
larger university outside where term time is 



24 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

all the time, is to translate and transmute 
truth into life so that people may behave 
well. 

In that address Jesus gave to the multitude, 
it is significant that the first word uttered 
was not a word of reproach, ignorant and 
faulty though the people were for the most 
part. It was not a word of duty, much as 
they needed instruction on that point. It was 
a word of high privilege; it was the word 
''blessed,'' or as we translate it now more 
accurately, the word ''happy." The whole 
world was seeking happiness and Christ took 
hold of that universal desire in His first 
word. He honored that desire for happiness 
by striking that keynote in the first sentence 
of His Charter Day address. He then pro- 
ceeded to direct the minds of the people to 
those sources where real and permanent hap- 
piness would be found. It did not spring, 
He said, so much from possessions or 
achievements as from a certain inner quality 
of life. He did not say, "Happy are the 
rich,'' or, "Happy are the successful." He 
said rather, "Happy are the gentle, the 
merciful, the aspiring, the pure hearted. 
Happy are they that hunger and thirst after 



TRUTH AND LIFE 25 

righteousness, who go about making peace." 
He bade men, therefore, seek first a certain 
disposition toward God and toward their fel- 
lows if they v/ould find happiness. 

We spend so much time and strength in 
changing and. improving the tools and the 
general machinery of life and then forget 
oftentimes to change and improve those who 
are to operate the machine. If we should 
take the sickle Ruth used when she gleaned 
after the reapers in the fields of Boaz, and 
lay it down beside one of those combined 
harvesters and threshers used in California 
and in the grain fields of the northwest, we 
might feel that we had made tremendous 
progress. But if we should take Ruth her- 
self and place her beside the wives and 
daughters of the men who make those har- 
vesters in the factories and operate them in 
the fields, it might seem that our progress in 
the more important line of manufacturing 
human values was not a thing to be cele- 
brated with international expositions. All 
the outside things are the tools and ma- 
chinery of life, and they are secondary. That 
which alone is primary is the quality and 
disposition of the life within. 



26 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

In one of his little books Henry Van Dyke 
refers to three ideals in education : the deco- 
rative, the marketable, and the creative. The 
man with the first thinks it is a fine thing to 
go to college. It gives one an air of dis- 
tinction. It enables him to belong to the 
University Club in the city where he lives. 
It enables him to refer to ^^my class" and to 
"the good old days" at Columbia or Prince- 
ton, at Harvard or Yale, at Stanford or 
California. He may even register himself in 
his own mind as a '^dig" and go in for a Phi 
Beta Kappa Key, with the idea that it will 
unlock doors closed to other men. And be- 
cause he is a university man and a graduate 
he feels that he possesses a rare and culti- 
vated taste in music and art, in literature and 
philosophy. He thinks of his education as a 
highly decorative appendage to his own life. 

The second man has no use for all this. 
Privately, he looks upon the decorative fel- 
low as a cultivated freak. He himself is 
thoroughly practical. He has his mind on 
the main chance. He is one of those ''no 
nonsense about me" men. He selects his col- 
lege and chooses his courses with one eye on 
the catalogue and the other eye on the cash 



TRUTH AND LIFE 27 

book he expects to keep by and by. He thinks 
of himself as a tool to be ground and sharp- 
ened so it will cut where other tools fail. He 
is very contemptuous in his attitude toward 
the study of dead languages or of philosophy. 
"'What good will all that do me when I get 
out into the world of business ?'^ He means, 
what good will it do his bank account, for he 
still thinks that a man's life consisteth in the 
abundance of the things that he possesseth, 
a certain eminent authority to the contrary 
notwithstanding. He wants an education, 
not for the purpose of living, but for the pur- 
pose of making a living, which is a very dif- 
ferent matter. He has the marketable idea 
of education. 

If any of you should stop on either of those 
two rounds of the ladder, your professors 
here would be ashamed of you. The found- 
ers of this noble university, in such event, 
would feel that you had disgraced it. If you 
allow your pupils to fail to recognize the real 
bearing of truth upon life, you ought to be 
cast out of the synagogue of learning. 

The only adequate ideal in education is the 
creative ideal. This do, this know, and thou 
shalt live ! The reward for reading books lies 



■<»'— 



28 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

not in the information gained or in the ideas 
acquired, but in the mental stimulus afforded, 
in the power we gain to read more books and 
better ones and, by and by, to think for our- 
selves and produce ideas of our own. The 
reward for doing your duty lies in the power 
you gain to keep on doing it and to do it bet- 
ter. The reward for meeting and mastering 
any hard situation in life lies in the power 
acquired to meet and master other still 
harder situations, and to aid your fellows in 
that same high task by your sympathetic in- 
sight and useful experience. The creative 
ideal of education, the perpetual ministry of 
truth to life, is the only one which proves 
satisfactory. 

And to go one step further, it is that truth 
which has been wrought into life and finds 
there habitual expression, which becomes 
effective in the teacher of youth or in the 
preacher of righteousness, or in the service 
rendered by any one to the deeper needs of 
his fellows. 

When St. Francis of Assisi established the 
order which bears his name, a young man, 
who thought quite as highly of himself as he 
ought to have thought, came and joined. 



i«< » »ii m tmm 



TRUTH AND LIFE 29 

The youth was eager to become a famous 
preacher, and the simple lessons assigned to 
him in the monastery and the somewhat 
lowly duties imposed upon him were most 
trying to his patience. But one day St. 
Francis came to the young man and said, 
''My son, let us go down into the village and 
preach.^' The invitation was accepted with 
great alacrity, for the young man was fairly 
bursting with religious eloquence which he 
longed to pour out upon the people. 

The two men went down into the village. 
They passed the time of day with a few ac- 
quaintances and neighbors as they met them 
on the street. They stopped at the market- 
place and made some purchases for the 
monastery, chatting in friendly fashion with 
the market men. They made a few brief calls 
on some families where sorrow or sickness 
had come. They spoke to a tradesman about 
employment for a promising boy who lived 
near the monastery. By and by, when they 
had discharged these and other similar 
errands, all of them utterly devoid of any 
interest to the young orator, the good St. 
Francis turned his face toward home. 

''But, my father,'^ the young man cried in 



30 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

dismay, 'Vhen are we going to preach?" 
''My son/' replied St. Francis, ''we have been 
preaching all the time/' The truth wrought 
out in terms of life and finding expression in 
those simple, ordinary relations and occupa- 
tions which make up the bulk of our human 
experience, investing them with new mean- 
ing and giving them a finer quality, becomes 
the highest form of message which men ever 
receive. 

The word made flesh, dwelling among men 
in simple, homely fashion, full of grace and 
truth, is ever the word which has power. The 
truth which has become flesh, muscles, nerves, 
vitality, competent to serve the needs of 
others with grace, is ever the effective instru- 
ment in all useful ministry. 

Religion shorn of all those accidents which 
sometimes fasten upon it has been defined as 
"personal devotion to the will of God as it 
stands revealed in Jesus Christ, finding ex- 
pression for its aspiration in worship and for 
its sense of obligation in obedient service.'' 
And, viewed after this vital fashion, it is im- 
possible for any one to come to his own 
highest self-realization or to meet fully his 



TRUTH AND LIFE 31 

responsibility to the generation in which he 
lives, without religion. 

Personal religion lifts a man out of the 
pettiness and isolation of his own little pri- 
vate efforts into the sense of participation in 
an august moral enterprise. It lifts him into 
the sense of fellowship with an Infinite Being 
in His resistless advance toward a superb ful- 
fillment. It enables the religious man to say 
at every step of the way, ''I am not alone, the 
Father is with me." And each man's beliefs 
and purposes, his habits of action and his 
ultimate aspirations should be made adequate 
to grasp and to retain this splendid form of 
experience. 



11 

THE WORTH OF INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE^ 

IN the last lecture I sought to indicate that 
the main office of truth is to minister to 
life ; and that truth wrought out in terms of 
life and finding habitual expression in those 
activities which make up the bulk of our ex- 
perience, is the truth which becomes most ef- 
fective in serving human need. 

But the moment we begin to deal with re- 
ligious truth we are made aware of the incom- 
pleteness of our knowledge. We are not in 
the realm of finality as we might be in pure 
mathematics or in formal logic. Our knowl- 
edge is limited and when we begin to push 
out along those lines of inquiry which seem 
to invite our advance, we find that knowledge 
speedily impinging upon a great world where 

^A portion of the material in this chapter appeared in my 
little book **The Cap and Gown/' published by Pilgrim 
Press, Boston, and is here utilized by their kind permission. 

32 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 33 

we do not know. We are brought face to 
face with an undiscovered country not 
mapped out as yet and apparently incapable 
at present of being accurately surveyed. We 
repeat the experience of those men of old 
"'who feared as they entered the cloud.'' We 
suffer confusion because we see spiritual 
reality through a glass darkly and in that 
mood of uncertainty we sometimes forget to 
act upon the light we actually enjoy. 

We can scarcely estimate the value of the 
service rendered to religion and especially to 
Bible study by a certain brilliant English 
essayist. His major study was not religion 
and his attitude toward the faith once deliv- 
ered to the saints was commonly regarded as 
unfriendly. But in his little book, ''Litera- 
ture and Dogma/' Matthew Arnold brought 
out over and over again with his marvelous 
skill and effective expression the helpful 
truth that the statements of the Bible touch- 
ing great spiritual realities do not undertake 
to be exact and final. The language is ''fluid, 
passing, poetic," rather than mathematically 
and scientifically exact. 

And in all religious speech when we come 
to deal with such august themes as God and 



34 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

prayer, duty and redemption, immortality 
and a final judgment, our expressions are as 
it were ''thrown out'' at these sublime real- 
ities confessedly too great for perfect com- 
prehension or exhaustive definition. In a 
word, the Bible is literature and not scientific 
dogma. Our religious knowledge at its best 
shades ofif into infinite spaces where our 
plumb lines do not touch bottom. 

It is good for every thoughtful person 
called to live his Christian life in quarters 
where the principle of organic evolution is 
frankly and fearlessly accepted, where liter- 
ary and historical study has greatly modified 
the popular feeling touching the original 
documents of Christian faith, where the study 
of psychology has made this human nature 
of ours seem a new and more puzzling phe- 
nomenon — it is good for any such thoughtful 
person to read, mark, learn, and inwardly 
digest the full implication of Matthew Arn- 
old's contention. He may at first feel as if 
the foundations were slipping out from 
under him, but if he will persist, he will find 
his mind cleared and his heart reassured as 
to the abiding worth of such knowledge as 
we do possess touching spiritual reality, 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 35 

stopping though that knowledge does a long 
way this side of completeness. 

He was a wise man in religious matters 
who said, "We know — '^and then added mod- 
estly, — ''in part/' This was not a statement 
emanating from some indifferent agnostic 
who, because religious questions are difficult, 
insists that he does not know anything about 
them. It was not the statement of a defiant 
infidel who, because he does not understand 
everything about religion as he would like to, 
declares that neither he nor any one under- 
stands anything about it. It was not the 
statement of one of those hesitating individ- 
uals who are always trying to steer a safe 
course somewhere between yes and no, be- 
tween the right of it and the wrong of it, who 
are never quite sure whether there is a God 
or not, but prefer to leave it an open question, 
with an ill-defined notion that the truth lies, 
perhaps, about halfway between the two 
claims. 

This man who said, ''We know, in part,'' 
was not an agnostic nor an infidel nor a hesi- 
tator. He knew certain things. He was 
sure of them. He was ready to say so right 
out in meeting and to stand up and be cut in 



36 THE MODERN MAN^S RELIGION 

two for them if need be. ''I know whom I 
have beHeved'' — he felt no uncertainty on 
that point. It is a long step toward useful 
faith to know ''whom'^ one has believed, even 
though he remains uncertain as to just what 
he believes at some points. ''I know the 
grace of our Lord Jesus Christ"— and this 
spiritual energy inwardly experienced had 
changed him from a narrow, bigoted, perse- 
cuting Pharisee into a man able to write the 
best hymn on love to be found in print. 
When you read that hymn which opens 
'Though I speak with the tongues of men 
and of angels and have not love, I am be- 
come as sounding brass or a tinkling cym- 
bal," you can think of nothing better — and 
the author of it embodied the spirit of it in 
his everyday life. '1 know that all things 
work together for good to them that love 
God"— and in his particular case ''all things" 
included a great deal of hardship and perse- 
cution, of disappointment and sorrow, but he 
never wavered in his faith that some wise 
purpose was being furthered by it all. This 
and much more he knew. "In part we know," 
was the way he would have placed his em- 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 37 

phasis and the actual content of his knowl- 
edge was large indeed. 

He makes his statement as an honest, mod- 
est, reasonable man face to face with those 
spiritual realities which are too great for 
perfect comprehension or final statement. 
His knowledge of them was considerable, but 
in his judgment they bulked greater than all 
our human knowledge of them. He must 
have realized when he said this that he was 
himself a man of no mean attainments. He 
wrote something like one third of the New 
Testament with his own hand. He has prob- 
ably done more to shape Christian thought 
than any other one save Christ Himself. He 
had in his own life been caught up into the 
third heaven, whatever that may mean — it 
points, undoubtedly, to some extraordinary 
spiritual experience. He was the most effec- 
tive missionary of a new faith the world has 
ever seen. He was a man of marvelous reach 
and grasp : yet face to face with those great 
realities, God and duty, prayer and redemp- 
tion, immortality and the final judgment, he 
frankly confesses that the returns are not all 
in ; that the last word has not been said and 



38 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

cannot now be said; that the full apprecia- 
tion of these high values has not been 
reached. He had the quality of intellectual 
honesty and modesty. He would have 
counted it wrong to assert more than one 
feels to be true. He would have shrunk 
from assuming a thoroughness of knowledge 
and a confidence of faith which were not his 
own, even as he would have shrunk from 
stealing some other man^s clothing that he 
might appear the more richly appareled. 

We are glad to find these words on the lips 
of this great disciple; they are reassuring. 
They match our own mood. They bring 
cheer to those of us who have been consid- 
erably troubled by the limitations of our own 
religious knowledge and by those remainders 
of uncertainty which hang upon our spirit- 
ual horizon like low-lying clouds. They fit 
into the temper of this modern time of ques- 
tioning and unrest so much in evidence on 
the college campus, in all university circles, 
and in the critical portion of the world gen- 
erally. 

The words of this intellectually honest 
man suggest that finality in religious belief 
is more difficult than some of the earlier gtn- 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 39 

erations in their simplicity supposed. As a 
matter of fact, one does not find those once 
famiHar words 'Tinis'' or ''The End" 
printed on the last page of a book so com- 
monly as in other days. Even where the au- 
thor may have said his entire say in several 
volumes, each one as bulky as a volume of 
the Britannica, he knows that there is more 
to be said. He leaves the way open without 
trying for a moment to block it by writing 
down "The End." 

We are conscious, some of us painfully so, 
some of us joyously so, that we have not 
reached the terminus on any of the great 
trunk lines of religious inquiry. We are 
scattered along at various way-stations, 
thankful for the part we know, grateful for 
the progress made, but confessing with the 
apostle of old that we have not attained, that 
we are not already made perfect either in 
practice or in theory. But if we have caught 
the spirit of that apostle, we are bent on 
using the part we know that we may press 
toward the mark for the prize of the high 
calling of God. This, you may say, is the 
dominant mood of the really aspiring ele- 
ment in that cautious, critical, inquiring tem- 



40 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

per so prevalent in modern life. We are, 
therefore, grateful for the word of this mod- 
est, reasonable man who, with all his unusual 
store of spiritual experience, said quietly, 
''We know in part/' 

If we are to use language at all in giving 
expression to our own religious life or in 
endeavoring to communicate it to others, we 
must do it as Arnold said, in a literary rather 
than in a dogmatic way. The larger portion 
of it will be language which suggests rather 
than defines. We shall employ many terms 
which serve as poetic symbols of certain 
transcendent realities standing over against 
them rather than as the exact mathematical 
equivalents of those realities. 

And our knowledge of those realities will be 
confessedly incomplete. If we had succeeded 
in drav/ing a hard and fast line around the 
being and character of God, He would by 
that very fact cease to be to us the Infinite 
One. He would be defined and limited by our 
own exhaustive knowledge of Him. ''We do 
not know anything about God unless we first 
know that we cannot know Him perfectly.'' 
If there were nothing more in prayer or in 
the great process of moral recovery wrought 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 41 

out in what we call redemption or in our ex- 
pectation of the life eternal than could be 
stated in black and white, then those com- 
manding interests would be at once com- 
pressed within limits which would rob them of 
much of their present helpfulness. We can- 
not put into precise definitions the great truths 
of religious life as we might do with some 
proposition in trigonometry. ''It doth not 
yet appear what we shall be" or what those 
spiritual forces may be made to yield, or 
what shall be the full significance of the 
great consummation for which we hope and 
toward which we patiently move. It doth 
not yet appear what any of these in their 
final outcome shall be— it is enough to know 
that this quest for ultimate achievements 
which elude exact and final statement will 
make us 'like Him." We shall in the con- 
summation be like the highest our minds can 
now conceive. 

In speaking to you, then, regarding the 
worth of this incomplete knowledge let me 
consider in practical fashion two or three 
fundamentals in our religious thinking. 
Some of you may have been disturbed as to 
the doctrine of Providence. You have been 



42 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

told on high authority that God reigns and 
that He does all things well. When times 
are good and things are coming your way, 
you actually believe it. You see that the way 
of the transgressor is hard, as it should be. 
You see that the way of righteousness seems 
on the whole to be the way of peace and 
honor. You share in the comfortable per- 
suasion that all things taken together in their 
completeness and final outcome are working 
a net result which will be good for those who 
are faced right. 

But about the time you have gotten your 
doctrine of Providence all snug you may wit- 
ness some occurrence like this. Here in your 
own circle of friends a young Christian 
mother dies ! She was an ideal daughter, a 
devoted wife, and the beautiful mother of 
children who loved her and needed her com- 
panionship more than they needed anything 
else on earth apparently. But with a whole 
community of people, perhaps, praying for 
her recovery she died, while just around the 
corner a group of rascals, who are making 
the world* worse rather than better, lived on, 
flourishing like so many green bay trees. 
Then somehow your doctrine of Providence 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 43 

receives a hard shock. It does not seem to 
be quite so clear that all things, even to the 
falling o£ a sparrow or the numbering of the 
hairs of our heads, are ordered by the rule 
of a wise and good God. 

What shall we say? We know that situa- 
tion as we know the whole mystery of human 
existence, only in part. We know the useful- 
ness of that fair young life here, we do not 
know to what further and perhaps higher 
service it has been called there. We see what 
has been interrupted here, we do not see 
what has been taken up further on. We do 
not know the ultimate effect of this stern 
sorrow upon that household compelled now 
to regird all their powers as they walk in the 
shadow of a great bereavement. We do not 
even know God's ultimate purpose for those 
rascals who lived on— the returns are not all 
in for them either. We know in part, but 
the part we know, taking human life broadly, 
is so reassuring as to the wisdom and justice 
of the divine character evidenced in His deal- 
ings with us that we are willing to trust God 
and wait. We walk on not by sight, but by 
faith. 

Ships in Norway entering the great fiords 



44 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

sometimes sail so close to the cliffs that one 
can stand on deck and almost lay his hand 
on the face of the rock. When one captain 
was asked about the peril of it, he said, 
'There is no danger. That which is in sight 
indicates what is out of sight. The slant 
above the water line indicates the slant below. 
We are perfectly safe.''' 

The general slant of God's dealings with 
men, taking the facts as we know them in 
the total impression they make on our minds 
as to His wisdom and justice, is such that we 
find ourselves prepared to trust Him below 
the water line of our knowledge. Therefore, 
when we cannot in some difficult situation 
make out His ultimate purpose and meaning, 
we fall back upon our confidence in His 
moral integrity. 

As to our faith in the divine integrity it 
has seemed to me that serious and observant 
men should not long remain in doubt. It is 
a faith which rests upon a wide induction of 
fact vaster by far than my own experience 
of His dealings with me or my own observa- 
tion of those facts which come within the 
range of my personal vision. It is like re- 
peating an axiom to say that the creature 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 45 

nowhere rises above the Creator, the stream 
is never higher than the source. If men at 
any time, anywhere show themselves good, 
there must be goodness in the Creator of 
those men, goodness in the force or forces 
lying back of them, name those forces as you 
will. 

And if the stream of human goodness has 
been widening, deepening, flowing more 
strongly as the ages have come and gone, 
this seems to point back to character and 
purpose in the One who set the stream flow- 
ing in the first place. Goodness in man 
argues goodness in God while badness in 
man does not argue badness in God, because 
sane men everywhere regard goodness as 
normal and badness as an abnormal thing to 
be overcome and cast out. 

And look at the swelling tide of human 
goodness as it flows down through the ages, 
gathering force and volume as it comes upon 
its victorious way! Look at Livingstone, 
laying down his life to carry light into a 
dark continent, spending himself freely for 
those whose lives were then unspeakably re- 
pulsive! Look at Lincoln, counting not his 
life dear if he might serve the cause of the 



46 THE MODERN MAN^S RELIGION 

Union and the interests of his brothers in 
bonds! Look at Jane Addams, not holding 
her intelligent and cultured life apart for 
selfish* enjoyment with those of her own 
class, but investing it with a free hand for 
the help of those impeded lives which find 
themselves on Halsted Street, Chicago! 
Look at the vast array of human goodness as 
it masses itself in saints and seers, in heroes 
and martyrs, in teachers and mothers, going 
forth not to be ministered unto but to min- 
ister and to give their lives for the better- 
ment of the race! Look at it and then ask 
yourself if you can believe for one moment 
that all this goodness originated itself, per- 
sisted and increased in opposition to the will 
of the Creator or in the face of His moral 
indifference or in the absence of any crea- 
tive goodness in Him ! The claim on the face 
of it would seem unspeakably absurd. This 
wider induction of fact begets a profound 
faith in the moral character of God. 

Heroes and martyrs in every age of the 
world have been laying down their lives for 
a principle. The true mother everywhere 
cares for her sick child, counting not her 
own pleasure, her comfort, or even her life 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 47 

dear if she may save her child. The poor 
dog attached to his master goes to the spot 
where he saw them lay the body and whines 
''for the touch of a vanished hand, for the 
sound of a voice that is still. '^ 

Has the Creator of such moral integrity 
in those heroes and martyrs kept none of it 
for Himself ? Has He, out of the ages gone, 
out of the brute life of our sub-human ances- 
tors, produced such surpassing devotion in 
the heart of the mother with no devotion in 
His own heart toward His helpless child? 
Has He instilled such faithful affection in 
the very dogs that perish, but failed utterly 
to share in that love Himself ? It is unthink- 
able! 

These forces which produce all these high 
qualities of life, attachment to the right, de- 
votion to the helpless, faithful affection for 
those we love, are universal forces. They 
are in the last analysis divine forces. When 
we look at the results accomplished, at the 
fruit which the great tree of universal forces 
yields, we cannot but believe that there is 
moral character at the heart of this system 
of energy. Therefore, reassured by our faith 
in the moral character of God, when we can- 



48 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

not see we trust, remembering that as to the 
full significance and final meaning of many 
a strange experience, "we know in part/^ 
Thus our confidence in what we call the doc- 
trine of Providence becomes to us a strong 
and defensible tower to shield us in the time 
of storm. 

Take also the matter of pra5^er and the 
way it enters into the formation of character 
and the shaping of events! We know be- 
yond a peradventure that prayer registers a 
definite and wholesome influence on the life 
of the man who prays. Those who loudly 
assert that virtue and vice are as purely 
physical products as sugar and vitriol, that 
all right action and wrong action can be ac- 
counted for on material grounds, have not 
made out their case. They have not begun 
to make it out. In the face of the present 
claim made by so many eminent philosophers 
and scientists that ultimate reality is sentient 
mind or spirit, the contention of these mate- 
rialists becomes daily more feeble. 

There is something unseen, mysterious, 
but real and powerful, which impels certain 
people to love the unlovely, to make sacrifices 
for the thoughtless and the ungrateful, to 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 49 

stand firm in the path of duty when it is any- 
thing but the hne of least resistance. The 
love of right, the sense of obligation, the 
habit of adherence to principle, all these are 
as real as granite. Yet the forces which 
make them strong are spiritual forces and 
these spiritual forces receive constant rein- 
forcement from the habit of prayer. 

This part we know. We have seen the 
hearts of men turned from anger to love, 
from sinful to holy purpose, from weakness 
to high resolve by prayer. We have seen the 
home life made sweeter because each day the 
members of a household come together and 
kneel before God, confessing their faults, 
asking His guidance and allowing that which 
is true and right within them to grow 
stronger by its sense of communion with 
Him who is altogether true and right. Any 
reasonable man in any part of the world 
would feel that his life, his property, and his 
family would be altogether safer in a com- 
munity where men prayed habitually than in 
one where they only used the name of God 
profanely. This part we know about prayer. 

But as to the ultimate and transcendent ef- 
fect of it, as to the final philosophy of those 



50 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

mysterious actions and reactions which take 
place when we kneel before Him, as to the 
precise way in which the finite spirit may be- 
come a co-laborer with the Infinite Spirit in 
the shaping of events, I freely confess that 
there is a great deal which I do not under- 
stand. I must in the nature of the case rec- 
ognize the incompleteness of my knowledge 
just as I recognize it when I think of the 
ether or of those waves of motion which 
make possible the wireless telegraph, or of 
those mysterious rays which pierce through 
what we had learned to call opaque, reveal- 
ing that which was hidden. 

I know in part touching this wonderful 
exercise we call prayer, but the part I know 
is so attended by beautiful and beneficent re- 
sults that I want my prayer for the coming 
of God's kingdom, for the doing of His will 
on earth, for the gift of bread sufficient for 
the day's need, for forgiveness and deliver- 
ance from evil — I want that prayer to go up 
winging its way to the throne of the Unseen 
backed by all the faith and hope and love I 
can put into it. And I am not troubled by 
the fact that I cannot in mathematical fash- 
ion demonstrate all the grounds of my confi- 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 51 

dence or predict with scientific certainty the 
results of my petition, for, Hke the apostle of 
old, I know in part. 

How narrow, unreasonable, and dogmatic 
unbelief sometimes shows itself! Here is a 
young man who, intellectually speaking, be- 
longs to the newly rich. His recently ac- 
quired knowledge does not set easily on him 
as yet. He says in haughty fashion, ''I will 
never accept anything which I cannot prove. 
I will not participate in any religious exer- 
cise which my intelligence does not thor- 
oughly understand and endorse.^' All this, at 
first glance, might seem like a bit of that 
fearless intellectual honesty and candor which 
are rightly held in such high esteem in 
university circles. But it is not that; it is 
only a bit of unconscious yet none the less 
humorous ''bluff.'' 

We are not to participate in anything 
which our intelligence does not thoroughly 
understand and endorse? It might be well 
to scrutinize that assertion. Here you are 
down town on a dark, cold night. You see 
an electric car approaching and you wish to 
reach your home. Not one in a hundred of 
you, not one in a thousand of those who use 



52 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

these cars could, if his hfe depended upon it, 
explain how it is that a certain invisible form 
of energy transmitted along that wire can 
in that ordinary street car be transformed 
into motion carrying it swiftly along, and 
into light making it possible for you to read 
your evening paper, and into heat making 
you thoroughly comfortable as you ride 
home. And if you should be privileged to 
hear the best explanation attainable given to 
it by some man of science, you would still be 
compelled to walk by faith and not by sight 
for you would recognize the fact that he, 
too, was throwing out his words in literary 
fashion at realities confessedly too mysteri- 
ous for perfect comprehension or exact defi- 
nition. 

But how foolish you would be to decline 
the help of that mysterious force which 
moves, heats, and lights the street car simply 
because your knowledge of all that is in- 
volved in those processes stops a long way 
this side of completeness ! How foolish you 
would be to refuse the help of the car and 
plod along through the darkness and the 
sleet, arriving at home an hour late for din- 
ner ! Hear, then, the parable of the trolley 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 53 

car! Make your own application o£ it to 
forces spiritual ! 

Take the question of the future life. 
There is a great deal here which we would 
like to know. What are our loved ones, who 
have gone on, doing now ? Are they the con- 
scious witnesses of the blunders and failures 
we make here ? How is right rewarded and 
wrong punished in that other world when 
the two are so intricately interwoven here? 
No man is so white a sheep but that there 
are occasional patches of goat about him 
here and there. No man is so bad but that 
there is some good in him if we ''observingly 
distil it out." And what of the final out- 
come ? Can the good people of the world be 
happily content if the sinful souls they loved 
are in conscious pain, or even if those sinful 
souls have been remorselessly wiped off 
the slate of existence? Is it, indeed, too 
much to hope that God's persuasions to 
righteousness, being infinite, may prove at 
last irresistible and so in every case suc- 
cessful? 

Dare we say it and feel it and act upon it ? 

'* Oh ! yet we trust that somehow good 
Shall be the final goal of ill. 



54 THE MODERN MAN^S RELIGION 

That nothing walks with aimless feet, 
That not one life shall be destroyed, 
Or cast as rubbish to the void 

When God hath made the pile complete." 

Thus men and women, who have loved and 
lost those who have passed out of this world 
without a sign of genuine repentance or of 
saving faith, have queried ever. A child can 
in five minutes ask more questions touching 
the future world than all the philosophers 
and theologians on earth can answer in as 
many years. 

We must remain for the present content 
with knowledge confessedly incomplete. We 
cannot measure off the streets of the new 
Jerusalem in kilometers. We cannot avail 
ourselves of any full description of its at- 
tractions or of its dangers in any kind of 
Baedeker. We cannot undertake to lay out 
any detailed program of God's dealings with 
the good and the bad people of earth in all 
the unending years. Nor is there the slight- 
est obligation resting upon us to make an 
attempt at the construction of such a pro- 
gram or at the composition of such a geog- 
raphy of the future world. 

We know in part and the part we may feel 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 55 

recasonably sure about is something like this : 
I feel a profound confidence that we shall live 
on after death. The grounds of my hope are 
miany. Here are the four main considera- 
tions on which my personal anticipation 
rests. The mass of unreason and injustice I 
would have left upon my hands, unexplained 
and utiexplainable, if I should undertake to 
deny the truth of immortality, is one. I can- 
not help believing that the great book of life 
will read right when we read it through— 
and that calls for more chapters than we find 
in this present world. 

The all but universal and persistent desire 
of men for a future life is another ground 
for faith. Somehow the integrity of the uni- 
verse is such that it does not develop in men 
normal, widespread, and persistent desires 
unless standing over against them some- 
where there is the corresponding satisfaction 
for those desires. 



**It must be so, Plato, 
Thou reasonest well ; 
Else whence this pleasing hope, 
This fond desire. 
This longing after immortality ? 



56 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

The fact that the clear visions and hv 
hopes of the best poets and prophets/ ^^e 
world has known have been so largely on. 
side of the life eternal, means much. 'J' 
seers have sung, and the prophets have u 
tered their highest anticipations by the powei 
of an endless life. 

The words and the attitude of firm confi- 
dence on the part of that supreme figure in 
history, Jesus Christ, mean still miore. He 
saw clearly, spoke wisely, lived divinely. I 
cannot believe that here He reared His ex- 
pectation and ours upon a fundam.ental mis- 
take. He did not argue about immortality 
or seek to establish it by the citation of proof 
texts; He moved habitually in the strengt' 
of His consciousness of the life eternal. 

Reason, experience, the best in literature 
and the attitude of the One who has taken 
the moral government of the world upon His 
shoulder as none other ever has, all stand so 
strongly on the side of positive faith that I 
feel confident of an unbroken life. The terms 
and conditions of that life I must leave to 
Him who planned it. 

As to the final judgment, I know this: I 
see that righteousness and love are useful 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 57 

beautiful here — they will be useful and 

utiful an3^where; and the clearer the light 

'.which they are brought to stand, the more 

.leir glory will be revealed. I see that sin 

and selfishness are mean and hateful here — 

they will be mean and hateful anywhere ; and 

the clearer the light in which they stand, the 

more their hatefulness will be manifest. 

What shall be the final fate of evil, I do 
not undertake to say. There is no necessity 
for me to outline a comprehensive program 
for the endless future. The clear prospects 
of the life to come where righteousness and 
love shall have their freer chance to be and 
to do, where sin and selfishness shall meet 
with more awful rebuke in that light where 
there is no darkness at all, these are sufficient 
to stimulate right action and to give effective 
warning to those who would identify their 
lives with any manner of evil purpose. As 
to the rest, we may, in view of the incom- 
pleteness of our knowledge, safely leave it to 
the wisdom and the justice of the Eternal. 

We frankly confess that we know in part 
— it is all we can do. But the worth of this 
incomplete knowledge springs from the fact 
that while we know in part, the part we know 



S8 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

is the part we habitually use. We wish we, 
knew more ; we hope to know more some time 
but, meanwhile, it is the act of wisdom to 
utilize such knowledge as wt do possess. 

In almost any direction, unless it be pure 
mathematics or formal logic, our knowledge, 
even in the sophomore year, stops a long way 
this side of completeness. No man knows 
the length and breadth, the height and depth 
of his wife's love for him if she is a good 
woman. Some part of it he knows ; but that 
wondrous affection she might show in some 
emergency, nursing him through a long ill- 
ness, or sharing with him some painful ex- 
perience, or bearing with him some heavy 
burden, he cannot know until the time comes 
for the extraordinary manifestation of that 
affection. But the part of the strength and 
beauty of that woman's love which he knows, 
is the part he uses. It ministers to his happi- 
ness and makes him feel every day in the 
year that he ought to be a better man to be 
worthy of it. And this is the attitude for the 
reasonably religious man. Those great reali- 
ties, God and duty, prayer and redemption, 
immortality and the final judgment, are too 
great for perfect comprehension; but he 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 59 

knows something of them and the part he 
knows is the part he uses. 

Next door to my home in CaHfornia were 
two little neighbors, boys of three and five. 
They were close friends of mine and they 
taught me much. Their father was a physi- 
cian, a busy, useful, Christian man. The 
boys understood their father's life in part. 
They knew that he was a doctor and that he 
visited sick people to make them well; but 
as to the methods he employed and the 
remedies he used, they knew nothing at all. 
They knew in a dim sort of way that he made 
the money which paid the bills and kept them 
in a home of comfort ; but as to his financial 
investments and prospects for the future, 
they knew nothing at all. They knew that 
along with the hearty good-will he felt to- 
ward everybody he loved their mother and 
them supremely; but as to how he came to 
love that particular woman, or how they were 
born of that love, or how far that love might 
go in defending and providing for them, 
they never concerned themselves for one 
moment. They knew their father's life 
in part. 

But here again the part they knew was the 



6o THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

part they used. They lived in their father's 
house; they sat at his table and ate what he 
provided for them; they greeted him with a 
shout when he came in from his work. They 
obeyed him and trusted him and thought he 
was the best man in the world. They climbed 
up into his lap and talked to him endlessly, 
not about his practice, but about their own 
small affairs, their tops and marbles and 
wagon — as he wanted them to do; he met 
them always on their own ground and dealt 
with them in the terms and interests of their 
own lives. Thus my two little friends lived 
and grew, knowing their father's Hf e in part. 
''Except ye become as little children ye 
shall in no wise enter in!" Except you be- 
come as little children in the house of your 
Father whose total life transcends your com- 
prehension of it, whose plans and purposes 
for you are vaster every way than your un- 
derstanding of them, ye shall in no wise enter 
His kingdom. But if you take the part you 
know and use it, acting on it, living by it, 
following where it leads, you will make ad- 
vance as surely as my two small friends are 
doing, growing up toward their manhood 
knowing their father's life in part. 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 6i 

How plain Christ made the duty of using 
the near and the f amiHar if we would under- 
stand the more remote ! He may have real- 
ized that religion would speedily become 
encrusted with misconceptions, making it dif- 
ficult for plain people to get at the vital ele- 
ments in it. He ma)^ have known that men 
would write big, dull books about it which 
no one would want to read. He may have 
foreseen that learned men would talk about 
it, using for the most part technical, incom- 
prehensible phrases in such a way as to con- 
fuse the people. At any rate, He made His 
own teaching simpler than that of any one 
whose words stand here recorded. 

He stood once at midnight talking with a 
thoughtful man regarding certain aspects of 
the religious life. He was speaking of the 
new birth, the emergence of a new life fresh 
and full of promise. ''How can these things 
be ?" the man said. "How can a man be born 
when he is old ?" The creative action of the 
Infinite Spirit upon the individual moral life 
was to him an inexplicable mystery. 

Just then the wind rustled the leaves over- 
head and Jesus said, 'The wind bloweth 
where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound 



62 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, 
and whither it goeth/' 

We cannot tell why the wind blows one 
day from the north and we have cold, an- 
other day from the south and we have heat, 
and another day from the east and we have 
rain. We cannot explain many of the mys- 
teries connected with the wind or how it is re- 
lated to all the other forces in the universe. 
But a man who is a fisherman can put up the 
little sail of his boat and fill it with this mys- 
terious wind. He can sail out on the broad 
ocean and come home at night with a boat- 
load of fish to feed the hungry. The wind 
that fills his sail he knows even though the 
origin, the destiny, and the relationship it 
sustains to the other forces of the universe 
are all unknown to him. And, like a man of 
sense, the part he knows is the part he uses, 
as he relates it helpfully to the needs of his 
personal life. 

So is every one who is born of the spirit, 
led by the spirit, used by the spirit! He 
knows the life of the Infinite Spirit in part, 
but the part he knows is the part he uses as 
he relates that part in helpful fashion to the 
needs of his own life. 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 63 

When we start in after that common-sense 
fashion, it is a straight course. The boy be- 
gins his study of mathematics not by stand- 
ing speechless and helpless before the mys- 
teries of differential calculus. He begins by 
learning to count, one, two, three, four, five, 
six, seven, eight, nine, ten. He goes ahead, 
moving along that plain path until with those 
same ten figures he may be computing the 
courses the planets take or measuring the 
distance of the fixed stars. 

The boy begins his study of literature not 
by feeling depressed in the presence of 
'Taradise Lost'' or ''Sordello.'' He begins 
by learning his letters, a, b, c, etc., and by 
learning the simpler combination of those 
letters into words which designate objects 
and acts familiar to him in his daily life. By 
and by, through the use of those same 
twenty-six letters, he is making his way 
through ''Hamlet'' and "Macbeth," or is 
walking with Emerson and Hegel across the 
fields of philosophy. 

In every situation in life progress is made 
not by taking the more distant and difficult 
problems first, not by being appalled and dis- 
couraged over the amount that we do not 



64 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

know; progress is made by taking the part 
we know and by relating that to our own 
lives in such a way as to make it the instru- 
ment for gaining fuller knowledge. And 
this is just as true in religion as in other 
fields of thought and action. ^'If any man 
will do, he shall know.'' And in his doing 
let him deal first with those things which are 
near and familiar, for in that way his insight 
and understanding become more competent 
to deal with things remote. 

I wish I might persuade any student who 
has never entered into an open, joyous, 
Christian life to just begin. In your work 
as a teacher you will need the great stores of 
help which this will open up. The task of 
education at its best is not to impart infor- 
mation or to give technical training to special 
faculties in the pupil — all this is only sec- 
ondary. The primary thing is to shape and 
enrich and mature that august thing we call 
'^personality.'' Education which stops short 
of that is not living up to its privileges. In 
the formation of personality genuine religion 
is an element which cannot safely be left out. 

In connection with this religious life of 
which I am speaking in this course of ad- 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 65 

dresses, there may be many things which you 
do not understand nor, perhaps, beHeve. We 
will put them aside for the moment, not ig- 
noring them, but merely postponing their 
consideration. Take the part you know ; the 
moral imperative of living the best life you 
see — and no finer life than that of a true 
Christian can be named; the need of some 
competent guide and helper — and none bet- 
ter than Jesus of Nazareth has thus far ap- 
peared; the sure benefits to be obtained by 
trust and obedience to the Highest you rec- 
ognize; the helpful reactions which come 
steadily through prayer and the reading of 
the Bible; the manifest advantage of cherish- 
ing the hope of a future life and of facing 
squarely upon the fact that what a man sows 
he reaps. 

All this you know ! Let the part you know 
be the part you use. If you will take what 
you know, act upon it, build it into your own 
experience, follow where it leads, you will 
be treading the path which will bring you to 
the place where you will know even as you 
are known. 



Ill 

A DEEPENING EXPERIENCE 

IN a clever magazine article, written by a 
man of affairs about a year ago, this 
statement was made: 'Tive men comprise 
Europe, these five and no more, — King Ed- 
ward of England, William Hohenzollern of 
Germany, Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the 
throne of Austria, Monsieur Isvolsky, Min- 
ister of Foreign Affairs in Russia, and 
Merry del Val, manipulator of the political 
influence of the Vatican ! There used to be 
two others, but one of them — Von Biilow by 
name— has passed into that obscurity from 
which few statesmen ever return; and the 
other, long a sinister figure on the shores of 
the Bosphorus, is now a prisoner in a Saloni- , 
can Villa/^ These five men comprise Europe, 
the writer said, because it lies within their 
power to control policies which will shape 
the history of the years that lie ahead. 

66 



A DEEPENING EXPERIENCE 67 

I do not undertake to pass upon the valid- 
ity of his statement. It probably sacrifices 
something in accuracy in order to be epi- 
grammatic — most epigrams earn their living 
by that sort of self-sacrifice. I quote the 
statement as indicative of the fact that there 
are in any period of history a few pivotal 
men upon whose influence may turn the 
course of movements mighty and far-reach- 
ing. 

In similar fashion you will find in any 
body of teaching a few key-words which 
seem to unlock the doors of the whole mean- 
ing contained there. In Christ's teaching 
there are four such words. If I should suc- 
ceed in holding them before you this morn- 
ing with something of their full import so 
that you would never forget them, I should 
feel that I had rendered you an important 
service. They might become to you like the 
four cardinal points of the compass in your 
spiritual voyaging and, held clearly in view, 
they would help you to orient yourself in any 
part of the world or in any phase of personal 
experience which might arise ; and thus they 
would enable you to lay out a straight course 
toward the haven where you would be. 



68 THE MODERN MAN^S RELIGION 

The four words are not addressed primar- 
ily to a man's powers of perception or of be- 
lief. They are addressed primarily to the 
will. They are meant to include the assent 
of the intelligence and to enlist the deeper 
emotions of the heart, but on the face of 
them they call upon every man not so much 
to believe or to feel as to act. And if any 
man will act upon them, he will speedily dis- 
cover within himself certain sublime reac- 
tions. The net result will be what I have 
called a constantly deepening experience. 
Let me name them to you, and I think you 
will agree with me that they are the four 
great words in the Christian message. 

The first one is the word ''Come.'' It in- 
vites the movement of the inner life toward 
that which is central, fundamental, vital. 
How often you find that word upon the lips 
of Christ. ''Can any good thing come out of 
Nazareth?" men asked; can the Messiah, for 
instance, come out of Nazareth ? His answer 
was not an argument or a citation of proof 
texts, but an invitation. "Come and see.'" 
Come and test these Messianic claims for 
yourselves. Put them to the proof of expe- 
rience. 



A DEEPENING EXPERIENCE 69 

He stood there, the supreme manifestation 
in history of that divine helpfuhiess which is 
not far from any one of us, for in it and by 
it v/e hve; He stood there calHng upon men 
to come to Him and by looking into His face, 
by hearing His words, by witnessing His 
deeds, by taking up the immediate influence 
of His personahty into their own hves, to 
decide whether or not any good thing had 
come out of Nazareth. It was through per- 
sonal experience that men were to decide 
whether or not the Messiah of the ages had 
so come. ''Come and see" — it was the call 
to a deeper form of experience. 

Jesus was always saying that. ''If any 
man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.'' 
If any man feels that his spiritual nature is 
becoming dry and unfruitful like some arid 
field, let him by an act of will, by taking and 
holding a new attitude toward the central 
source of spiritual impulse, enter anew into 
personal fellowship with the divine helpful- 
ness. His inner life will there drink, as some 
thirsty field in the San Joaquin valley in 
California drinks from the Merced River 
flowing bank full because it holds the melting 
snows from the high Sierras. 



70 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

''Come unto me, all ye that labor and are 
heavy laden, and I will give you rest/' The 
rest named here was no idle surcease from 
toil. Real rest is never merely that — it means 
a renewal of power, an invigoration of all 
the finer energies for further and more effec- 
tive effort. This is what Christ promised in 
that deeper experience to be gained by enter- 
ing into a profounder sense of fellowship 
with Him. If any life, wearied and heavy 
laden, feels that the will has gone lame, that 
the conscience is dulled, that the moral vigor 
is unequal to the demands made upon it, let 
it come unto Christ and He will give it re- 
newing and invigorating rest. In fellow- 
ship with Him men develop a sense of 
poise, of balance, and of adequacy to their 
tasks. As the days are so the strength 
becomes. 

''Come and dine,'^ He said on one occasion 
to a boatload of men. They were cold, for 
it was in the early spring when the wind 
blows chill across the Sea of Galilee. They 
were hungry, for they had been fishing all 
night. They were discouraged, for that 
night they caught nothing. They were men 
who had been unfaithful to duty. The leader 



A DEEPENING EXPERIENCE 71 

of the group had turned his back upon his 
best friend, another had denied the truth of 
that friend's statements, and they had all 
shown themselves unreliable. In that hour 
when they were cold, hungry, discouraged, 
and at fault, Christ went to them, not with 
words of denunciation or of reproach— the 
word upon His lips was one of gracious in- 
vitation. ''Come and dine," He said, point- 
ing to the fish broiling and the bread toasting 
upon the bed of coals. After He had fed 
them He addressed Himself to the deeper 
needs of each man, saying, ''Lovest thou 
me?" And when He had won a satisfactory 
response. He sent them out to feed the sheep 
and to nurture the lambs of His flock. His 
first word to that boatload of discouraged 
men was a word of gracious invitation. 

I need not cite further instances. This at- 
titude toward human need runs like a warm, 
red thread all through Christ's message. He 
was steadily inviting the movement of the 
individual life toward that which is central, 
fundamental, vital. He was one who had 
the right to say ''Come." When we take the 
essential qualities of His life and hold them 
sacred, esteem them divine, lift them to the 



72 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

supreme place in our thought, we are not 
misled. I£ any man has seen Him, he has 
seen the Father. Here was one who could 
call Himself '^the Son of Man/' the heir of 
all that is essentially human, the epitome of 
all that we include in our thought of man in 
capacity and in prospect. 

He is to-day competent to stand at the cen- 
ter of the whole movement for moral ad- 
vance and say ''Come." We never find Him 
pointing men away from Himself as the 
poets and the prophets, the pastors and the 
evangelists, are wont to do. He says 
"Come," and the acceptance of that invita- 
tion, the movement of the individual life to- 
ward Christ in thought, in aspiration, in 
confidence, and in the habit of obedience, be- 
comes inevitably prophetic of the highest 
good known to human experience. 

It is the call of the laboratory method. 
The scientific man does not stand outside the 
door and out of his own inner consciousness 
or from the hearsay of the street develop 
a priori theories as to how certain chemicals 
or certain forms of life should act and react 
under given conditions. He goes into the 
laboratory and, taking the materials into his 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 43 

receives a hard shock. It does not seem to 
be quite so clear that all things, even to the 
falling o£ a sparrow or the numbering of the 
hairs of our heads, are ordered by the rule 
of a wise and good God. 

What shall we say? We know that situa- 
tion as we know the whole mystery of human 
existence, only in part. We know the useful- 
ness of that fair young life here, we do not 
know to what further and perhaps higher 
service it has been called there. We see what 
has been interrupted here, we do not see 
what has been taken up further on. We do 
not know the ultimate effect of this stern 
sorrow upon that household compelled now 
to regird all their powers as they walk in the 
shadow of a great bereavement. We do not 
even know God's ultimate purpose for those 
rascals who lived on— the returns are not all 
in for them either. We know in part, but 
the part we know, taking human life broadly, 
is so reassuring as to the wisdom and justice 
of the divine character evidenced in His deal- 
ings with us that we are willing to trust God 
and wait. We walk on not by sight, but by 
faith. 

Ships in Norway entering the great fiords 



44 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

sometimes sail so close to the cliffs that one 
can stand on deck and almost lay his hand 
on the face of the rock. When one captain 
was asked about the peril of it, he said, 
"'There is no danger. That which is in sight 
indicates what is out of sight. The slant 
above the water line indicates the slant below. 
We are perfectly safe.'' 

The general slant of God's dealings with 
men, taking the facts as we know them in 
the total impression they make on our minds 
as to His wisdom and justice, is such that we 
find ourselves prepared to trust Him below 
the water line of our knowledge. Therefore, 
when we cannot in some difficult situation 
make out His ultimate purpose and meaning, 
we fall back upon our confidence in His 
moral integrity. 

As to our faith in the divine integrity it 
has seemed to me that serious and observant 
men should not long remain in doubt. It is 
a faith which rests upon a wide induction of 
fact vaster by far than my own experience 
of His dealings with me or my own observa- 
tion of those facts which come within the 
range of my personal vision. It is like re- 
peating an axiom to say that the creature 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 45 

nowhere rises above the Creator, the stream 
is never higher than the source. If men at 
any time, anywhere show themselves good, 
there must be goodness in the Creator of 
those men, goodness in the force or forces 
lying back of them, name those forces as you 
will. 

And if the stream of human goodness has 
been widening, deepening, flowing more 
strongly as the ages have come and gone, 
this seems to point back to character and 
purpose in the One who set the stream flow- 
ing in the first place. Goodness in man 
argues goodness in God while badness in 
man does not argue badness in God, because 
sane men everywhere regard goodness as 
normal and badness as an abnormal thing to 
be overcome and cast out. 

And look at the swelling tide of human 
goodness as it flows down through the ages, 
gathering force and volume as it comes upon 
its victorious way! Look at Livingstone, 
laying down his life to carry light into a 
dark continent, spending himself freely for 
those whose lives were then unspeakably re- 
pulsive ! Look at Lincoln, counting not his 
life dear if he might serve the cause of the 



46 THE MODERN MAN^S RELIGION 

Union and the interests of his brothers in 
bonds! Look at Jane Addams, not holding 
her intelHgent and cultured life apart for 
selfish enjoyment with those of her own 
class, but investing it with a free hand for 
the help of those impeded lives which find 
themselves on Halsted Street, Chicago! 
Look at the vast array of human goodness as 
it masses itself in saints and seers, in heroes 
and martyrs, in teachers and mothers, going 
forth not to be ministered unto but to min- 
ister and to give their lives for the better- 
ment of the race! Look at it and then ask 
yourself if you can believe for one moment 
that all this goodness originated itself, per- 
sisted and increased in opposition to the will 
of the Creator or in the face of His mioral 
indifference or in the absence of any crea- 
tive goodness in Him ! The claim on the face 
of it would seem unspeakably absurd. This 
wider induction of fact begets a profound 
faith in the moral character of God. 

Heroes and martyrs in every age of the 
world have been laying down their lives for 
a principle. The true mother everywhere 
cares for her sick child, counting not her 
own pleasure, her comfort, or even her life 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 47 

dear if she may save her child. The poor 
dog attached to his master goes to the spot 
where he saw them lay the body and whines 
*'for the touch of a vanished hand, for the 
sound of a voice that is still." 

Has the Creator of such moral integrity 
in those heroes and martyrs kept none of it 
for Himself ? Has He, out of the ages gone, 
out of the brute life of our sub-human ances- 
tors, produced such surpassing devotion in 
the heart of the mother with no devotion in 
His own heart toward His helpless child? 
Has He instilled such faithful affection in 
the very dogs that perish, but failed utterly 
to share in that love Himself ? It is unthink- 
able! 

These forces which produce all these high 
qualities of life, attachment to the right, de- 
votion to the helpless, faithful affection for 
those we love, are universal forces. They 
are in the last analysis divine forces. When 
we look at the results accomplished, at the 
fruit which the great tree of universal forces 
yields, we cannot but believe that there is 
moral character at the heart of this system 
of energy. Therefore, reassured by our faith 
in the moral character of God, when we can- 



48 THE MODERN MAN^S RELIGION 

not see we trust, remembering that as to the 
full significance and final meaning of many 
a strange experience, "we know in part.'' 
Thus our confidence in what we call the doc- 
trine of Providence becomes to us a strong 
and defensible tower to shield us in the time 
of storm. 

Take also the matter of pra)^er and the 
way it enters into the formation of character 
and the shaping of events! We know be- 
yond a peradventure that prayer registers a 
definite and wholesome influence on the life 
of the man who prays. Those who loudly 
assert that virtue and vice are as purely 
physical products as sugar and vitriol, that 
all right action and wrong action can be ac- 
counted for on material grounds, have not 
made out their case. They have not begun 
to make it out. In the face of the present 
claim made by so many eminent philosophers 
and scientists that ultimate reality is sentient 
mind or spirit, the contention of these mate- 
rialists becomes daily more feeble. 

There is something unseen, mysterious, 
but real and powerful, which impels certain 
people to love the unlovely, to make sacrifices 
for the thoughtless and the ungrateful, to 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 49 

stand firm in the path of duty when it is any- 
thing but the hne of least resistance. The 
love of right, the sense of obligation, the 
habit of adherence to principle, all these are 
as real as granite. Yet the forces which 
make them strong are spiritual forces and 
these spiritual forces receive constant rein- 
forcement from the habit of prayer. 

This part we know. We have seen the 
hearts of men turned from anger to love, 
from sinful to holy purpose, from weakness 
to high resolve by prayer. We have seen the 
home life made sweeter because each day the 
members of a household come together and 
kneel before God, confessing their faults, 
asking His guidance and allowing that which 
is true and right within them to grow 
stronger by its sense of communion with 
Him who is altogether true and right. Any 
reasonable man in any part of the world 
would feel that his life, his property, and his 
family would be altogether safer in a com- 
munity where men prayed habitually than in 
one where they only used the name of God 
profanely. This part we know about prayer. 

But as to the ultimate and transcendent ef- 
fect of it, as to the final philosophy of those 



50 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

mysterious actions and reactions which take 
place when we kneel before Him, as to the 
precise way in which the finite spirit may be- 
come a co-laborer with the Infinite Spirit in 
the shaping of events, I freely confess that 
there is a great deal which I do not under- 
stand. I must in the nature of the case rec- 
ognize the incompleteness of my knowledge 
just as I recognize it when I think of the 
ether or of those waves of motion which 
make possible the wireless telegraph, or of 
those mysterious rays which pierce through 
what we had learned to call opaque, reveal- 
ing that which was hidden. 

I know in part touching this wonderful 
exercise we call prayer, but the part I know 
is so attended by beautiful and beneficent re- 
sults that I want my prayer for the coming 
of God's kingdom, for the doing of His will 
on earth, for the gift of bread sufficient for 
the day's need, for forgiveness and deliver- 
ance from evil— I want that prayer to go up 
winging its way to the throne of the Unseen 
backed by all the faith and hope and love I 
can put into it. And I am not troubled by 
the fact that I cannot in mathematical fash- 
ion demonstrate all the grounds of my confi- 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 51 

dence or predict with scientific certainty the 
results of my petition, for, Hke the apostle of 
old, I know in part. 

How narrow, unreasonable, and dogmatic 
unbelief sometimes shows itself! Here is a 
young man who, intellectually speaking, be- 
longs to the newly rich. His recently ac- 
quired knowledge does not set easily on him 
as yet. He says in haughty fashion, ''I will 
never accept anything which I cannot prove. 
I will not participate in any religious exer- 
cise which my intelligence does not thor- 
oughly understand and endorse.'' All this, at 
first glance, might seem like a bit of that 
fearless intellectual honesty and candor which 
are rightly held in such high esteem in 
university circles. But it is not that; it is 
only a bit of unconscious yet none the less 
humorous ''bluff." 

We are not to participate in anything 
which our intelligence does not thoroughly 
understand and endorse? It might be well 
to scrutinize that assertion. Here you are 
down town on a dark, cold night. You see 
an electric car approaching and you wish to 
reach your home. Not one in a hundred of 
you, not one in a thousand of those who use 



52 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 



these cars could, if his life depended upon it, 
explain how it is that a certain invisible form 
of energy transmitted along that wire can 
in that ordinary street car be transformed 
into motion carrying it swiftly along, and 
into light making it possible for you to read 
your evening paper, and into heat making 
you thoroughly comfortable as you ride 
home. And if you should be privileged to 
hear the best explanation attainable given to 
it by some man of science, you would still be 
compelled to walk by faith and not by sight 
for you would recognize the fact that he, 
too, was throwing out his words in literary 
fashion at realities confessedly too mysteri- 
ous for perfect comprehension or exact defi- 
nition. 

But how foolish you would be to decline 
the help of that mysterious force which 
moves, heats, and lights the street car simply 
because your knowledge of all that is in- 
volved in those processes stops a long way 
this side of completeness ! How foolish you 
would be to refuse the help of the car and 
plod along through the darkness and the 
sleet, arriving at home an hour late for din- 
ner ! Hear, then, the parable of the trolley 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 53 

car! Make your own application of it to 
forces spiritual ! 

Take the question of the future life. 
There is a great deal here which we would 
like to know. What are our loved ones, who 
have gone on, doing now ? Are they the con- 
scious witnesses of the blunders and failures 
we make here ? How is right rewarded and 
wrong punished in that other world when 
the two are so intricately interwoven here? 
No man is so white a sheep but that there 
are occasional patches of goat about him 
here and there. No man is so bad but that 
there is some good in him if we ''observingly 
distil it out.'' And what of the final out- 
come ? Can the good people of the world be 
happily content if the sinful souls they loved 
are in conscious pain, or even if those sinful 
souls have been remorselessly wiped off 
the slate of existence? Is it, indeed, too 
much to hope that God's persuasions to 
righteousness, being infinite, may prove at 
last irresistible and so in every case suc- 
cessful? 

Dare we say it and feel it and act upon it ? 

** Oh ! yet we trust that somehow good 
Shall be the final goal of ill. 



54 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

That nothing walks with aimless feet, 
That not one life shall be destroyed, 
Or cast as rubbish to the void 

When God hath made the pile complete." 

Thus men and women, who have loved and 
lost those who have passed out of this world 
without a sign of genuine repentance or of 
saving faith, have queried ever. A child can 
in five minutes ask more questions touching 
the future world than all the philosophers 
and theologians on earth can answer in as 
many years. 

We must remain for the present content 
with knowledge confessedly incomplete. We 
cannot measure off the streets of the new 
Jerusalem in kilometers. We cannot avail 
ourselves of any full description of its at- 
tractions or of its dangers in any kind of 
Baedeker. We cannot undertake to lay out 
any detailed program of God's dealings with 
the good and the bad people of earth in all 
the unending years. Nor is there the slight- 
est obligation resting upon us to make an 
attempt at the construction of such a pro- 
gram or at the composition of such a geog- 
raphy of the future world. 

We know in part and the part we may feel 



INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE 55 

reasonably sure about is something like this : 
I feel a profound confidence that we shall live 
on after death. The grounds of my hope are 
many. Here are the four main considera- 
tions on which my personal anticipation 
rests. The mass of unreason and injustice I 
would have left upon my hands, unexplained 
and unexplainable, if I should undertake to 
deny the truth of immortality, is one. I can- 
not help believing that the great book of life 
will read right when we read it through— 
and that calls for more chapters than we find 
in this present world. 

The all but universal and persistent desire 
of men for a future life is another ground 
for faith. Somehow the integrity of the uni- 
verse is such that it does not develop in men 
normal, widespread, and persistent desires 
unless standing over against them some- 
where there is the corresponding satisfaction 
for those desires. 



**It must be so, Plato, 
Thou reasonest well ; 
Else whence this pleasing hope, 
This fond desire. 
This longing after immortality ? ' 



S6 THE MODERN MAN^S RELIGION 

The fact that the clear visions and bright 
hopes of the best poets and prophets the 
world has known have been so largely on the 
side of the life eternal, means much. The 
seers have sung, and the prophets have ut- 
tered their highest anticipations by the power 
of an endless life. 

The words and the attitude of firm confi- 
dence on the part of that supreme figure in 
history, Jesus Christ, mean still more. He 
saw clearly, spoke wisely, lived divinely. I 
cannot believe that here He reared His ex- 
pectation and ours upon a fundamental mis- 
take. He did not argue about immortality 
or seek to establish it by the citation of proof 
texts; He moved habitually in the strength 
of His consciousness of the life eternal. 

Reason, experience, the best in literature, 
and the attitude of the One who has taken 
the moral government of the world upon His 
shoulder as none other ever has, all stand so 
strongly on the side of positive faith that I 
feel confident of an unbroken life. The terms 
and conditions of that life I must leave to 
Him who planned it. 

As to the final judgment, I know this: I 
see that righteousness and love are useful 



A DEEPENING EXPERIENCE 73 

own hands, makes experiments for himself. 
Then he knows — he speaks no longer from 
hearsay or in speculation; his utterance is 
grounded in actual experience. 

The scientific man in religion does not 
view the subject from across the street, or 
from the seat of the scornful, or from the 
last pew in some dimly lighted building. He 
accepts the invitation of Christ and enters 
the laboratory. He will know for himself 
what religion may be made to mean to his 
own inner life. He moves toward that which 
is central, fundamental, and vital that he 
may experience for himself the necessary 
reactions. 

He takes the four Gospels and reads them 
and rereads them. He gets the image of 
that life, the flavor of that teaching, the 
sense of the influence of that person upon 
other persons, deep down into his own inner 
consciousness. He seeks to imbibe that spirit 
and to reproduce according to the measure 
of his capacity the essential qualities of that 
character, and to experience at first hand the 
help there to be found in resisting tempta- 
tion, in mastering difficulty, in bearing bur- 
dens, and in standing firm in the path of 



74 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

moral obligation when it is not the line of 
least resistance. He is not speculating or 
listening to hearsay; he is making experi- 
ments in his own right. 

It is the only way to gain that knowledge 
of the truth which yields power. The child 
learns to walk not by hearing lectures on the 
subject but by walking, with many a faulty 
step and tumble. The boy learns to speak by 
speaking, with much bad syntax and ill-con- 
sidered rhetoric at first. Men learn to play 
golf by playing golf, with bad strokes innu- 
merable at the start, tearing up the soil and 
breaking their sticks, that the later satisfac- 
tion of a splendid drive may be theirs. Men 
learn to know the presence of God and to 
enjoy the help of all these spiritual realities 
by practice. The best of anything cannot be 
adequately described. It is impossible even 
to frame a transcript of it which can be 
handed about in words. It must be experi- 
enced at first hand in order to be known. 

You may recall that prison scene in ''Adam 
Bede.'^ Hetty had been condemned to death 
for the murder of her child which was born 
in shame. She was to be executed the next 
day. The night before, Dinah Morris, a re- 



A DEEPENING EXPERIENCE 75 

ligious mystic, went to the unfortunate girl 
in the jail. She had a warm heart of wo- 
manly sympathy as well as the open vision 
of things unseen. The guilty woman clung 
to the innocent one and cried like a child. 
"You won't leave me, Dinah. You '11 keep 
close to me.'' ''No, Hetty, I will not leave 
you, but there is Some One else in this cell 
besides me — Some One close to you." 
''Who?" replied the frightened girl, for the 
cell was dark and Hetty's eyes were holden. 
"Some One who has been with you through 
all your hours of sin and struggle. And to- 
morrow, when I cannot follow you, He who 
is with us now will be with you then." It 
was a strong, clear statement of spiritual 
reality, but it was all Greek to poor Hetty. 
Even Dinah Morris could not convey to the 
inexperienced soul the sense of the divine 
presence. The great things in life cannot be 
described— they must be felt at first hand. 
The word "come" stands of necessity in the 
very forefront of Christ's message. 

The somewhat hackneyed revival appeal, 
"Come to Jesus," may be the emptiest sort 
of phrase. It may mean only the light- 
hearted adoption of a certain theological the- 



76 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

ory according to which the acceptance of a 
certain scheme of salvation centering in Him 
will change one's eternal destiny. It may be 
only a sentimental appeal, not addressed to 
the real moral nature and never finding the 
man's will. It may only stir those emotions 
which lie near the surface as the waters in 
some shallow pool are stirred to their depths 
by every passing breeze. 

But, rightly understood, that well-worn in- 
vitation, ''Come to Christ,'' may have tre- 
mendous significance. It may mean the gath- 
ering up and the organization of all the 
materials of one's life into a Christian system 
of activities and the directing of them to cer- 
tain moral ends which find their highest his- 
torical manifestation in Him. It may mean 
the high resolve to so direct all the energies 
of one's being toward that quality of man- 
hood found in Him as to make the whole life 
a quest for sound and reliable health, for 
mental clearness and efficiency, for moral 
vigor, and for the fine spirit of unselfish de- 
votion. If those words are given their full 
content, then it is a majestic summons. And 
that great word ''come," the movement of 
the inner life toward that which is central, 



A DEEPENING EXPERIENCE 77 

fundamental, and vital, is the first key-word 
in the Gospel. 

The second great word in the Christian 
message is the word "Follow/' It under- 
takes to make the continuous movement of 
the life an advance along lines not identical 
but rather parallel with the line of movement 
in His own life. He found men fishing. 
''Follow me,'' He said, ''and I will make you 
fishers of men." He would utilize the capac- 
ity developed in that familiar, accustomed 
toil for the gaining of higher ends. He 
would make them competent to take and hold 
this finer form of value. In the familiar 
terms of their own calling, by a new use of 
those very faculties by which they had been 
earning their bread. He would transform 
their function in society into something 
of vastly greater worth. 

He would render them able to "launch out 
into the deep," into thoughts, aspirations, 
and activities which lie far below the surface. 
He would send them out beyond the shallows 
where they had been investing their strength, 
and there they would be made competent to 
do business in great waters. Thus they 
would find themselves able to offer better re- 



;8 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

turns from their labor to meet the needs of 
their fellows. ''Follow me/' He said, ''and 
I will make you effective on deeper levels of 
being/' 

He was orderly in His procedure. It meant 
much, as we have already seen, for a life to 
come to Him in genuine fashion. It would 
mean still more for that life to follow, to 
face in the direction where He faced, to 
keep step with Him in the advance made 
toward a great fulfillment, to feel itself a 
living, moving part of the vast spiritual en- 
terprise which bears His name. The soul of 
the individual enters into its essential dignity 
by holding such an attitude toward God, by 
being found in such relations to other lives, 
by maintaining such ^ personal bearing in 
its own profounder aspirations as always to 
be counted in as a "follower" when the Chris- 
tian forces are reckoned up. The word "fol- 
low'^ is a term of great significance in the 
Christian message. 

When the rich young ruler came to Christ 
asking what he should do to inherit eternal 
life, Jesus, knowing the unutilized potencies 
of that well-endowed, well-equipped life, said 
to him frankly, "Sell and give and follow 



v^ 



A DEEPENING EXPERIENCE 79 

me/' The young ruler was directed to 
make it the habit of his life to translate 
holdings into impartings. He was to con- 
vert possession into service. He was to 
do this not merely in the coarser, easier 
matter of giving money, but in the use of all 
those qualities of mind and heart which 
caused Jesus to love him as He looked upon 
him. 

Sell and give and follow Him ! This was 
to be the general method. 'If any man will 
come after me, let him deny himself, and take 
up his cross,''— not "my cross," but ''his 
cross," which might involve sacrifice of an 
entirely different sort from that witnessed 
on Calvary ! "Let him deny himself, and take 
up his cross, and follow." In ordinary prac- 
tice the Christian man must be faced as 
Christ was, making it the rule of his life to 
subordinate the small things to the great, 
personal gratification to a higher usefulness. 
Thus he mingles and blends his own indi- 
vidual energies in his particular field with 
those of the Eternal Spirit who goes every- 
where, not to be ministered unto but to min- 
ister and to give itself for the moral recovery 
of many. 



8o THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

In the face of this moral imperative to be 
faced right and to be moving in the same 
general direction with the highest we know, 
Christ brushed aside a great many things as 
unimportant and irrelevant. When His dis- 
ciples began to speculate as to what this man 
should do and what that man should do, as 
to what would happen to them in the next 
fifty years, or as to the possibility of some 
one tarrying on earth until Christ should 
come again, Jesus said to one of them almost 
sharply, ''What is that to thee? Follow thou 
me/^ 

You can ask a thousand questions in as 
many minutes which do not admit of any 
immediate and final answer. You can find 
a thousand people who are not doing their 
duty as you may conceive of duty. You can 
pile up around you queries and problems of 
a religious sort until you stand in them chin- 
deep and helpless. What is all that to you, 
if you are not following the best you have 
ever seen or heard or felt as in any wise pos- 
sible to you ? This obligation is fundamental. 

It was the transparent honesty of the au- 
thor of that little book "In His Steps" or, 
''What Would Jesus Do?" rather than any 



A DEEPENING EXPERIENCE 8i 

special literary skill which carried it up to a 
circulation of something like two millions of 
copies. The author took the words of Christ 
seriously and endeavored to apply them di- 
rectly to the needs of modern life. The ethi- 
cal soundness of his main contention, how- 
ever, may be questioned. 

'Tn His steps''— not always! Our lines 
of life may lie parallel with His, but they 
may not be identical. We may be called to 
traverse certain fields of activity which He 
never entered. In that case we shall be mak- 
ing steps of our own — it may be toward the 
same general goal. The letter of slavish imi- 
tation would kill many useful and necessary 
forms of activity where the spirit of a pur- 
pose thoroughly sympathetic with His would 
serve to make those activities more com- 
pletely and usefully alive. 

By simply reading these brief, discon- 
nected narratives we do not know exactly 
what Jesus would do under modern condi- 
tions. He never married — most of us live or 
are to live in family relations. He was never 
engaged in any trade or business during the 
period covered by these narratives — most 
men and women are compelled to give the 



82 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

bulk of their time and strength to some secu- 
lar occupation. He seems to have owned no 
property; we never read of His giving 
money to any one although He was con- 
stantly surrounded by human need. With us 
the right use of money is one of the most 
serious obligations of the moral life. He was 
the subject of a monarchy which ruled His 
native province in arbitrary fashion^ allow- 
ing the people no privileges of participation 
in civic affairs, while we are the responsible 
citizens of a free Republic. We cannot, if 
we would, follow in His steps because the 
work cut out for us carries us of necessity 
into paths He never trod. We can ''follow'' 
in the sense of facing squarely the great 
imperatives which ruled His life and in seek- 
ing to reproduce the spiritual quality of His 
service in terms of our own employment. 

The third word introduces a new and more 
dynamic element. Christianity is not a more 
searching code of commandments than that 
associated with Sinai ; it is not a mere system 
of ethics more perfect than those of Confu- 
cius. It does not aim merely to induce men 
to keep a better devised set of rules than 
were ever known before. It is a gospel 



A DEEPENING EXPERIENCE 83 

rather than a code. It is not legal, it is evan- 
gelical. In its whole method the emphasis is 
placed upon inwardness. It provides for a 
naturalness, a spontaneity, a sense of liberty, 
and an abiding joy, which hard and fast 
obedience to the best code attainable would 
never secure. Therefore, the third great 
word in the Christian message is the term 
"'Abide." This summons points to that sense 
of vital union between the human and the 
divine which is secured by a deeper experi- 
ence of reality. 

''Abide in me and I in you,'' He said in 
that supreme hour in the upper room. "The 
branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it 
abide in the vine — no more can ye.'' It is 
only when the branch maintains an unbroken 
and vital sense of union with the parent vine 
that it bears fruit. By that sense of union 
it bears fruit night and day, it scarce knows 
how. The mighty vine lays hold of the uni- 
versal forces, the soil and the sunshine, the 
rain and the dew, and then it sends the pulsa- 
tions of its own energy into every branch 
and the branch bears fruit. Cut the branch 
off, allow it to cut itself off, were it possessed 
of this power through some opposing will of 



84 THE MODERN MAN^S RELIGION 

its own, and its ability to expand, to bear 
fruit, to live at all, would be gone. No more 
can men live, expand, and bear fruit as they 
were meant to do, except they abide in Him. 

''If ye abide in me, and my words abide in 
you," as settled principles of action, as deter- 
mining ideals, ''ye shall ask . . . and it shall 
be done.'' The upthrust of your life in re- 
quest, the outreach of it in service will ac- 
complish your desire. You will go forth 
with the strength of ten because your heart 
is pure and your aspiration true through that 
sense of union with Him. 

A single grain of dust at the point of con- 
tact will turn back a current of electricity 
and leave the room dark or withhold power 
from the machine. A single grain of con- 
scious, wilful, deliberate evil at the point of 
contact between the soul of man and the 
Spirit of the Eternal will defeat the benefi- 
cent purpose of the Master. Abide in Him ; 
keep the way open, the point of contact clear, 
the sense of union real, and your whole 
moral effort will be made effective. 

I said at the outset that the four great 
words were addressed mainly to the will; 
that they involved action. This word "abide'' 



A DEEPENING EXPERIENCE 85 

may seem to have reference rather to a pas- 
sive and quiescent attitude. But it is a liv- 
ing, moving, accomplishing Christ with 
whom we have to do. When His spirit would 
advance with you to that higher mode of life 
for which you were intended, you cannot 
"abide" if you lag behind. When He would 
summon you to some nobler service and ally 
Himself with you more profoundly in the 
rendering of it, you cannot ''abide'' if )^ou 
decline that service. The kingdom of God is 
''a going concern"; it is not static, it is a 
thing of life. The man who walks with God 
must keep moving. His inner life cannot be 
static ; it must advance, keeping step with the 
divine purpose. If you would abide, you will 
be compelled to act steadily and nobly. 

It is in the maintenance of this sense of 
union with the Eternal that prayer finds what 
is to me its greatest value. I believe in prayer 
because I believe in God. If I can hear, He 
can. If I can make reply, He has the same 
power. If I wish to make reply when my 
child speaks, how much more shall He, the 
perfect moral being. 

I believe in prayer because Christ be- 
lieved in it. He was too wise to waste His 



86 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

time uselessly. He spent whole nights in 
prayer. He had more to say about prayer 
than any other one whose words stand re- 
corded in holy writ. It is significant that the 
perfect man was thus a man of prayer. Hu- 
manity at its best prays. When men for- 
sake the example of Christ, thinking they can 
do better, they go farther and fare worse. 
It is so regarding this habit of prayer. 

I believe in prayer because of what I see 
when I turn to the long and broad lines of 
human experience. Men always have prayed 
—it seems to be one of the persistent habits 
of our race. The fact that it is so wide- 
spread and has so long endured indicates that 
it has utility. When you find a fin on a fish 
or a wing on a bird, or what is popularly 
known as an "instinct'^ in an animal, you 
know that it has some use or it would not be 
there. Useless organs disappear or become 
rudimentary. The very persistence of this 
habit of prayer raises a strong presumption 
that such an exercise of one^s powers is both 
rational and useful. 

With this persistent habit of the race in 
mind it is instructive to recall the testimony 
of a distinguished evolutionist. In his little 



A DEEPENING EXPERIENCE 87 

book, 'Through Nature to God," John Fiske 
says that in nature we have found it to be 
true that ' 'Everywhere the internal adjust- 
ment has been brought about so as to har- 
monize with some actually existing external 
fact. The eye was developed in response to 
the outward existence of radiant light, the 
ear in response to the outward existence of 
acoustic vibrations, the mother's love came 
in response to the infant's needs. If the re- 
lation established in the morning twilight of 
man's existence between the human soul and 
a world invisible and immaterial is a relation 
of which only the subjective term is real and 
the objective term is non-existent, then, I 
say, it is something utterly without precedent 
in the whole history of creation.'' If the 
capacity of man for fellowship with God 
through prayer were real only at our end of 
the line and unreal at the other, then it would 
be an utter break in the whole method dis- 
covered in the ascertained uniformities of 
nature. "The lesson of evolution therefore 
is that through all these weary ages the hu- 
man soul has not been cherishing in religion 
a delusive phantom, but in spite of seemingly 
endless groping and stumbling, it has been 



88 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

rising to the recognition of its essential kin- 
ship with the ever-Hving God/' 

But when I would find the deepest assur- 
ances as to the value and efficacy of prayer, 
I look within. The heart is renewed, the 
affections are purified, the aspirations are 
lifted higher, the lame will is made strong, 
and the immediate sense of union with the 
invisible spirit of good, that is to say of God, 
is deepened by prayer. 

This I know as I know that fire burns, that 
water slakes thirst, that good food satisfies 
hunger and renews strength. I am not specu- 
lating nor speaking from hearsay ; I come to 
you with knowledge gained by the laboratory 
method. I would not limit the value of 
prayer to its ascertainable reactions upon the 
life of the man who prays. While I feel the 
incompleteness of my knowledge touching 
any final philosophy as to the precise way in 
which the finite will becomes co-laborer with 
the Infinite Will in the shaping of outward 
events, I have confidence that it is so. But 
these experiences of personal benefit in those 
blessed and persistent reactions which are 
constantly coming to the soul of the man who 
offers genuine and expectant prayer as one 



A DEEPENING EXPERIENCE 89 

of the normal expressions of his deeper self, 
are clear beyond any peradventure. 

In these days when we stand amazed at 
the results accomplished by certain invisible 
forces, the Roentgen ray, wireless telegra- 
phy, the bearing of mental suggestion upon 
the healing of functional disease, we should 
not be reluctant or grudging in our judgment 
as to the possible efficacy of prayer. It was 
not a recluse, a pietist, or even a clergyman, 
it was a man trained as a chemist and for 
forty years the distinguished president of 
Harvard University— it was President Eliot 
who said, ^Trayer is the transcendent effort 
of human intelligence." He felt that a man 
stands in his noblest attitude before God 
when he summons the best that is in him into 
action and bends all the energy of affection 
and will toward the attainment of some holy 
end through prayer. It is a force to be reck- 
oned with in this world where the unseen 
so often lords it over the seen. It would be 
difficult to picture our human nature as en- 
tering more fully by any act into the sense of 
its own surpassing dignity and worth. 

We need not be disturbed by the fact that 
we have not reduced the possibilities of 



90 THE MODERN MAN^S RELIGION 

prayer, to be realized within and not in de- 
fiance of the great uniformities of God, to 
an exact science. We have not reduced to 
anything Hke an exact science the influence 
of a mother's love upon her children, or the 
effect of a good name upon a man's prospects 
of success, or the physical benefits of a cheer- 
ful habit of mind. We have not reduced to 
an exact science the forces at v^ork in a 
wheat field— they are too intricate for hu- 
man intelligence. Perfect intelligence could 
determine in advance just how many grains 
of wheat in each bushel cast into the soil 
would grow and exactly what the harvest 
would be, but no man can tell. Perfect intel- 
ligence could tell why certain prayers seem 
to succeed and others fail, but such complete 
intelligence regarding all the forces to be 
considered is not within our reach. 

But even though in all these fields our 
knowledge stops far short of completeness, 
enough is known to encourage continued ef- 
fort. Mothers love their children; a right- 
minded man guards his good name ; sensible 
people promote health by good cheer; and 
farmers continue to sow their wheat in con- 
fidence that they will reap. In like manner, 



A DEEPENING EXPERIENCE 91 

thoughtful people keep on praying, assured 
by the words and the example of Christ ; and 
still further assured by an ever-increasing 
volume of religious experience, that prayer 
works out its own beneficent results. And 
one of the most beneficent results lies in that 
maintenance of a sense of union between the 
human and the divine. 

''Abide in me !" You are not alone in the 
quest for character, in the desire to serve 
your own generation, in the wish to grow 
toward your own completeness. You are not 
alone— the Father is with you. You may be 
walking some busy street, or grappling with 
some intellectual problem, or facing a room 
full of restless pupils, or fighting hard in 
some inward moral conflict— it matters not, 
the Father is with you and by the habit of 
prayer you may come to maintain unbrokenly 
that sense of sweet and exalted fellowship 
which brings a mighty sense of reinforce- 
ment to all your powers as you learn how to 
abide. 

The fourth great word in the Christian 
message is the word ''Go"; it indicates that 
all these finer experiences are to find expres- 
sion in far-reaching action. It looks out 



92 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

with eager expectation upon the broad field 
of kindly and competent service. 

Jesus says to every obedient man at a cer- 
tain stage of his experience, ''Come/' and the 
man comes; and at another stage He says, 
''Go,'' and the man goes. "Go home to thy 
friends, and tell them how great things the 
Lord hath done for thee." "Go work . . . 
in my vineyard." "Go to the lost sheep of 
the house of Israel"— they were sent first to 
men of their own race and nation. "Go," He 
said at last, "ye into all the world, and make 
known the good news to every creature." 
And straightway His followers went out 
teaching men whatsoever He had com- 
manded them, enrolling them as disciples 
under the tuition of a nobler method of life, 
and washing their lives clean as they bap- 
tized them into that name which stands for 
the manifold helpfulness of God. 

The experience which had been deepened, 
enriched, and matured by coming to Him, by 
that movement toward what is central; 
which had been developed by following, by 
facing all its activities in harmony with the 
great advance for which He stood; which 
had been steadied and reassured by its sense 



A DEEPENING EXPERIENCE 93 

of union, was now to find fuller expression 
in moving out upon all the fields of service it 
mighfadequately cover. It was to ''go/' 

Impression must precede expression else 
there would be nothing to express. The in- 
take must come first in order that there may 
be a store to draw upon when we would give. 
But unless the cycle completes itself, the life 
enriched by the profounder experiences I 
have been discussing finding its outlet in 
wholesome usefulness, there will be stagna- 
tion and death. 

'Treely ye have received''— and then be- 
cause the life was enriched by what it had 
received, the other words inevitably follow— 
"freely give." If the last injunction is dis- 
regarded, it is only a question of time until 
the capacity to freely receive will be gone. I 
shall speak in a later address more directly 
touching this whole matter of service and I 
simply refer to it here. But this word ''go" 
indicates that every life must develop by find- 
ing expression in useful activity. 

These are the four great words of the 
Christian message. Come, Follow, Abide, Go. 
What more is there to be said than is here 
suggested when we group these words 



94 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

around the commanding figure of one who 
has taken the moral government and leader- 
ship of the world upon His shoulder as none 
other ever has ? They cover the ground. 

They indeed represent a certain cycle of 
experience. The last comes back upon the 
first. The command to "go^^ does not mean 
that the man ceases to '^come" or to ''follow'' 
or to ''abide." It does not involve for a mo- 
ment any separation of his life from the 
source of the original impulse, but only a 
closer union. Men came to Christ, absorbed 
His spirit, were made ready to follow, be- 
came strong through abiding in His love and 
then they went out into all the world to re- 
produce His influence according to the meas- 
ure of their ability. And, lo! they found 
that He was with them more than ever and 
would be always, even unto the consumma- 
tion of the age. Come, follow, abide, go — 
they form a perfect cycle ! 

When Christ stood at the well, listening to 
the rude banter of the woman who was 
amused because a Jew asked a Samaritan for 
a drink, when the Jews had no dealings with 
the Samaritans, He suddenly recalled her to 
the tragedy of her own situation by saying, 
"If thou knewest the gift of God, . . . thou 



A DEEPENING EXPERIENCE 95 

wouldst ask/' There she was, face to face 
with the greatest spiritual opportunity which 
had ever come to her unfortunate Ufe. If 
she had eyes to see, she could look into the 
face of the Eternal. If she had ears to hear, 
she could hear some of the noblest words 
which ever fell from human lips. If she had 
the will for it, she might drink the water of 
life freely. 

But she was blind and deaf to all this at 
the outset. The well was deep and in her 
poor understanding of the finer things in life 
she had nothing to draw with. She spent 
those moments in idle banter and in quibbles 
about theology, discussing the contention be- 
tween the Jews and the Samaritans as to the 
proper place where men ought to worship. 
''If thou knewest the gift of God,'' Jesus 
said, ''thou wouldst ask." The deeper expe- 
riences of life were there within reach, but 
she was neglecting them. 

The indictment which will be brought 
against many of the men and women in our 
own day, I feel, will not be that they were so 
dull and stupid as not to know of anything 
better than the weak, thin, flat lives many of 
them are living. This is not the fact. They 
all realize in some moment of thoughtfulness 



96 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

that there is something better than this poor 
quality of being they habitually show. Some 
of .them in earlier years were living lives 
more worthy of their best powers. Som-e of 
them still find their hearts hungry for 
righteousness and their souls athirst for the 
living God. But they have been thrown into 
intellectual confusion perhaps by certain 
modern conceptions which are dominant, and 
they have not taken the time to readjust and 
to straighten it all out. Some of them, by 
the sharp pace of modern life and the appar- 
ent necessity for giving attention to so many 
interests, have allowed the deeper things to 
be crowded out and thrust to one side. Thus 
they have allowed themselves to slip back in 
their own ideals, habits, and resolves. They 
have become listless where they should be 
spiritually energetic. They lack the dispo- 
sition to ask and to act in such a way as to 
possess themselves of the best gifts of God. 

In that high hour when Christ met His 
disciples for the last interview in the upper 
room He wished to bestow upon them a new, 
a more potent, and a more truly inward equip- 
ment for their work. He had shown them in 
His own life a matchless example which 



A DEEPENING EXPERIENCE 97 

would never fade out of their minds. He 
had given them His own exalted teachings 
and neither they nor we will ever forget how 
He spake as never man spake touching the 
deep things of life. But now He would give 
them that without which His example and 
His teaching would be comparatively un- 
fruitful. 

He drew them around Him in intimate fel- 
lowship and ^'breathed upon them/' as if He 
would impart unto them life out of His own 
more abundant store of life. And as He did 
this He said, ''Receive ye the Holy Spirit." 
The word He used for ''receive" indicated no 
mere passive attitude on their part. It was 
the Greek word "lambano," which means 
"take." By your own active faith, by the 
clasp and retention of your own high resolve, 
by the insistent claim of your deepest self, 
"take" this deeper experience of the divine 
help! This is the method by which that gift 
of God is ever to be received. It comes in 
response to the spirit of initiative on our 
part. And it comes to lead our minds into 
all truth and our hearts into an ever-deepen- 
ing experience. 



IV 

THE PRACTICAL USE OF THE BIBLE 

IN that well-known vision recorded in the 
last book in the Bible a mighty angel ap- 
peared. He was clothed with a cloud. He 
wore a rainbow on his head. His face shone 
like the sun because o£ the radiant interest 
he felt in the work he was called to do. He 
stood ready for the widest usefulness, his 
right foot upon the land and his left foot 
upon the sea. 

And in his hand, as the main instrument 
of his power, as the chief agent by which he 
was to accomplish the moral ends he had in 
view, he held, not the sword of military con- 
quest, not the coin of a far-reaching com- 
merce, not the swinging censer of some po- 
tent ecclesiasticism casting its spell upon the 
hearts of men by the use of ceremony— he 
held in his hand a little book, open. He ex- 
pected to achieve the results he had in mind 

98 



THE PRACTICAL USE OF THE BIBLE 99 

by the instruction, the persuasion, and the 
moral appeal of the truth. 

You can hardly find a more suggestive 
picture of the general method of this century 
in which we live, or a clearer indication as to 
our main reliance, than this ancient picture 
where the messenger from on high came 
upon the scene holding in his hand a little 
book, open. 

We do not know what kind of a book it 
was— the narrative does not state. I have a 
feeling, however, that in all probability it 
was not a trigonometry. It was undoubtedly 
a good book; it was probably the best book 
on which the angel could lay his hand. It 
was certainly a book calculated to relate it- 
self in definite fashion to the needs of human 
life. This fact of itself gives us a significant 
hint. 

It was a little book, not a ponderous tome 
repelling the ordinary reader by its size ; not 
a musty, leather bound octavo, so laden with 
ancient erudition as to be of interest only to 
some specialist with technical training. It 
was a volume convenient to hold, — he had it 
in his hand. It was a book readily accessible 
to those who, from compulsion or from 



loo THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

choice, measure out the time allotted to that 
sort of reading sparingly. It was, thus, a 
book within the compass of the average 
interest. 

It was a book not nearly so large, I fancy, 
as that complete volume which contains all 
the canonical scriptures of the Old and New 
Testaments. The ordinary Bible with its 
sixty-six separate books could hardly be 
called ''a little book.'' This more compact 
volume which the angel held in his hand as 
he made his approach to the moral life of the 
race comprised, perhaps, only the more vital 
and essential elements in the scriptures. It 
presented these elements standing out clear 
and free from those ancient and partial re- 
mainders which for busy people have only a 
remote historical interest. The little book 
contained, we may believe, a compact state- 
ment of spiritual realities freed from the in- 
evitable deposits left by the ruder practices 
of antiquity, and freed from those local and 
temporary elements which must of necessity 
recede through the gradual cancellation 
wrought by the process of spiritual develop- 
ment. You may say that this little book 
might represent to us the net result of that 



^' ' ■'- -■^- ■ -^ ''■ '■ '■■ '-- ■ =" ^ --^ - ^ 



THE PRACTICAL USE OF THE BIBLE loi 

wise, patient, and discriminating scholarship 
which undertakes to set forth in briefer com- 
pass and in clearer phrase God's message to 
our race. 

The little book was open, wide open. It 
invited on the face of it the fullest, freest 
scrutiny of its actual contents. There was 
to be no peeping nor squinting in the study 
of it ; no hiding of the seat of intelligence in 
the sand, ostrich fashion, under the vain pre- 
tense that no difficulties had confronted the 
men who had undertaken the hard task of 
discovering and bringing out the divine mes- 
sage in that varying literature composed by 
authors so widely removed in time, in tem- 
perament, and in task. 

In the gradual compilation of this little 
book from the best to be found in that larger 
literature of sixty-six books, which taken as 
a whole averaged lower in actual worth, the 
defective moralities and imperfect insights 
which belong naturally to the raw period of 
any people's history, had been faced frankly 
and then fearlessly relegated to the back- 
ground even though they were found pref- 
aced by a 'Thus saith the Lord." 

The drift toward form and legalism from 



I02 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

which not even that people chosen for its 
spiritual primacy among the nations had 
been free, had been appraised and accorded 
its rightful significance. The law of growth 
according to which neither mountains nor 
valleys, rivers nor forests, languages nor in- 
stitutions nor religions ever spring suddenly 
into being by some arbitrary and omnipotent 
''Let there be/' — this law of growth had been 
fully recognized. And now with the out- 
come of this patient, discriminating study at 
his command the divine messenger stood, 
well equipped for moral service on sea and 
land, with that vital, usable element of holy 
writ held in his hand as a little book, wide 
open. 

I am speaking here in parables as you are 
all aware. I am claiming a full measure of 
that liberty which goes with this particular 
literary form. In more direct phrase, I 
might say that in our Bible we have a heav- 
enly treasure. But we find that treasure 
shaped and restricted by the fact that it is 
contained and entangled in a curiously 
wrought earthen vessel. The treasure itself 
is sufficient to make men wise unto salvation 
and to furnish them thoroughly for all sorts 



THE PRACTICAL USE OF THE BIBLE 103 

o£ good work, but it lies securely, and some- 
times obscurely, imbedded in a genuinely his- 
torical process. 

In that this process is historical, rather 
than a magical something lying to one side 
and lacking all connection with other move- 
ments of thought and life in that period 
when it made its appearance, the shameful 
immoralities of Lot and Samson, the cruelty 
and treachery of Jael and Jezebel, the harsh 
Song of Deborah, and the cynical unbelief of 
Ecclesiastes, inevitably appear. Those im- 
perfect moralities and defective insights 
frankly recorded in the Old Testament, and 
sometimes claiming for themselves divine 
sanction, belong there as naturally as the 
blade belongs to a certain stage of develop- 
ment in that process which leads at last to 
the full corn in the ear. And it is the high 
office of modern Biblical study to discover 
and to disentangle those elements which are 
merely local, temporary, and incidental from 
those other elements which are universal, 
abiding, and essential. It is in the interests 
of an honest and defensible faith, and of a 
consequent increasing usefulness for the real 
content of this literature, that thoughtful 



I04 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

men are scrutinizing its every part and en- 
deavoring by competent scholarship to place 
our confidemce in its permanent value upon 
foundations which stand sure. 

The positive and practical value, then, 
which modern critical study has for the Bible 
will be found mainly in these four considera- 
tions : First, it has closed the debate on cer- 
tain vexed questions which once troubled the 
heart of Israel and now trouble it no more. 
The coarse and, from the present point of 
view, the senseless attacks upon the author- 
ity and inspiration of the Bible made by such 
men as Thomas Paine, Robert G. IngersoU, 
and Charles Bradlaugh have now become im- 
possible. If brought forward to-day, they 
would not even amuse or entertain or shock, 
to say nothing of persuading, the average 
intelligence. It would be so plain that such 
blows were directed at a man of straw that 
they would be promptly ruled out of court 
as incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial. 
The Bible itself is the same book to-day that 
it was when the attacks referred to upon its 
teachings brought consternation to the ten- 
der hearts of many believers, but the whole 
point of view held by thoughtful people has 



THE PRACTICAL USE OF THE BIBLE 105 

so changed as to rob such attacks of any 
measure of force. 

Modern BibHcal study has relieved those 
inadequate moralities of an earlier day, pa- 
triarchal polygamy, unrebuked slavery, re- 
taliation of the eye-f or-an-eye and tooth-f or- 
a-tooth sort, from the impossible task of 
doing duty as sanctions for the moral dull- 
ness and backwardness of certain Christian 
centuries. It has also relieved those inade- 
quate standards of an early day from the 
exacting responsibility of undertaking to 
serve as veritable expressions of the mind 
of the Lord. To us they are nothing of the 
sort. 

Take, for example, that direction given, as 
the narrative states with divine authority, 
regarding the law of retaliation. It pro- 
vided that it should be ''an eye for an eye, a 
tooth for a tooth, a life for a life." It was, 
indeed, a word of the Lord for the crude 
moral life of that early day. An eye for an 
eye is not an ideal arrangement, but it is 
better than a head for an eye. It provided 
for a measured and limited retaliation to re- 
place that wild, unregulated vengeance into 
which those barbarous people often fell. 



io6 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

Not content with an eye for an eye, they 
would sometimes in the spirit of vengeance 
take the Hfe of one who had maimed another 
by putting out his eye. Not content with a 
life for a life, they would exterminate a 
whole tribe when one man of the offending 
tribe had killed some man in the tribe which 
sought to retaliate. An eye for an eye, a 
tooth for a tooth, a life for a life, would 
mean shameful retrogression for the more 
highly developed ethical life of our own day, 
but for the immature life of that primitive 
people it was a word of the Lord spoken in 
advance of their current practice and calcu- 
lated to lead them to a higher level of con- 
duct. 

You would have to go some distance from 
the turnpike to-day to hear a sermon in justi- 
fication of that law of retaliation from any 
other point of view, or one in defense of the 
moral quality of the imprecatory psalms, or 
one with any clear note of approval in it for 
the cruder doctrine of blood atonement, or 
one with any expression of real agreement 
with many of those inadequate moral stand- 
ards which, to an earlier generation, stood 
as the very law of heaven. It has been made 



SBkJS 



THE PRACTICAL USE OF THE BIBLE 107 

clear that no further significance attaches to 
those interesting exhibits of the law of 
growth than we attach to the preliminary 
stages in any other process of development. 
The process is to be judged, not by the crude 
appearance or the unfinished character of its 
earlier phases, but by its final outcome. In- 
deed, all work is to be judged by its tenden- 
cies, direction, and ultimate form rather 
than by its earlier and preparatory stages. 
The Bible is to be judged by the moral con- 
clusions to which it finally brings us and by 
those visions of spiritual reality which hang 
clear and resplendent in our sky when the 
fogs of an earlier morning have been swept 
away. 

Modern criticism has relieved us also from 
the mental squint consequent upon the pain- 
ful efifort to make it appear that every part 
of the Bible is in strict agreement with every 
other part. It does not attempt to square 
the two varying narratives of the Creation in 
the first and second chapters of Genesis, or 
to find perfect agreement in the two accounts 
of the Deluge diifering as they do in regard 
to the length of time the waters were upon 
the earth and as to the number of clean ani- 



io8 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

mals taken into the ark, or to reconcile the 
divergent statements as to the basis offered 
for Sabbath observance in the two accounts 
of the Ten Commandments recorded in the 
twentieth chapter of Exodus and in the fifth 
chapter of Deuteronomy. It does not seek, 
in a hundred instances which might be 
named, to estabhsh an exact and entire 
agreement in these varying narratives. 

We have abundant evidence for the exis- 
tence of different documents, for the influ- 
ence of varying schools of opinion. We 
know that the priestly and the prophetic wri- 
ters in the Old Testament, in narrating the 
same events, held different points of view. 
They varied in the placing of their emphasis 
and in their general interpretation. 

The whole game of hide and seek skillfully 
played with proof texts, as men have striven 
and striven in vain to make all the varying 
sections of this entire literature speak in uni- 
son, is a thing of the past among the more 
intelligent Bible students. The efforts of 
those earnest people who have endured an 
intellectual agony and bloody sweat, in their 
attempt to reconcile part with part in the in- 
terests of some theory of verbal or plenary 



THE PRACTICAL USE OF THE BIBLE 109 

inspiration, have been practically abandoned. 
Thoughtful men rejoice that scholarship has 
arranged these sacred writings in their suc- 
cessive layers so as to indicate, even to the 
popular mind, the stages of growth and thus 
make plain the successive attainments in 
moral insight and in spiritual power of those 
men of old. And this view of the Bible fur- 
nishes us with an adequate defense against 
a formal line of attack upon its inspiration, 
which is in no danger of being discredited. 

In the second place, the modern method of 
Biblical study, by its frank acceptance of the 
principle of growth, correlates that study 
with all other study. The great principle of 
organic evolution, once regarded as the dire 
enemy of all sound religious faith, as a dan- 
gerous adversary to be promptly anathema- 
tized and cast out of the synagogue, has now 
been welcomed and made at home in the field 
of Bible study. The earth grew, as we all 
know, and the processes of development laid 
bare by modern geology offer us a most fas- 
cinating field for study. Institutions grow, 
languages grow, literature and religions 
grow. Each one of these mighty trees with 
branches now innumerable was once like a 



no THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

grain of mustard seed. In similar fashion 
the Bible itself grew. It stands before us as 
the outcome and product of long periods of 
moral development where men at first groped 
in thick darkness, and then began to see as 
through a glass, darkly, and then later, 
touching some of their duties and privileges, 
saw face to face. 

"The impregnable rock of holy scripture'^ 
is not a happy phrase. It was coined and 
popularized by one of the foremost Christian 
statesmen of the last century, William Ewart 
Gladstone, in the sketch he wrote bearing 
that significant title, but its associations and 
suggestions are misleading. The Bible is 
not a rock. It is not in any sense ''a heavenly 
meteorite,'' as some pious soul called it, 
dropped down out of the sky with no earthly 
history, standing quite apart from the grop- 
ings and yearnings of men. 

The Bible is rather one of those mighty 
trees having its roots deeply planted in that 
common life which is of the earth, earthy; 
declaring in its concentric rings the story of 
its slow advance; exhibiting in the shape of 
its spreading branches, in the color and for- 
mation of its twigs and leaves, the influence 



THE PRACTICAL USE OF THE BIBLE iii 

of climatic conditions. The inner life of this 
useful tree which bears wholesome fruit 
every month in the year and whose very 
leaves are for the healing of the nations, is 
indeed the life of the living God, but the 
material utilized in its composition was taken 
from the common soil. The great tree of 
scriptural truth as it stands before us was 
formed from the dust of the ground, but the 
Eternal Spirit, through the profound and 
unusual experiences of the men who wrote 
it, breathed into it the breath of His own 
mighty life until it stands possessed of a liv- 
ing soul. 

Modern critical study has brought out 
more clearly this process of development. 
Israel's entire message to the world, from 
the ancient Song of Deborah and the early 
book of the Covenant on up to the Sermon 
on the Mount and the prayer of Christ the 
night He was betrayed, has traveled the 
main road of historical development. 

The New Testament itself opens with 
what may seem a long, tiresome, and mean- 
ingless list of proper names. But these dry 
names furnish us a line of human genealogy. 
They were intended to throw additional light 



112 THE MODERN MAN^S RELIGION 

upon the origin of the unique personality 
which the New Testament is to bring to the 
attention of the world. This effort to trace 
the human ancestry of Jesus of Nazareth 
was the painstaking attempt of some Hebrew 
composing his gospel especially for Hebrews 
to indicate that some, at least, of the forces 
which brought the Messiah lay securely 
imbedded within the history of His own 
race. 

The truth of God in its entirety comes to 
us in this organic way. It is not a freak or 
a fault in the world of spiritual formation. 
It is not a disconnected phenomenon stand- 
ing apart in the world of magic. The study 
of it is to be closely correlated with all other 
lines of serious research. 

You can see at once the immense gain in 
interest and in thoroughness which is thus 
secured for Bible study. Here, also, the sci- 
entific habit of mind and the principles of 
literary criticism are to be made at home. 
Men are taught to notice when they are read- 
ing prose and when they are reading poetry 
—the difference is more radical than would 
be indicated by merely printing one in 
stanzas and the other solid. The principle of 



THE PRACTICAL USE OF THE BIBLE 113 

development in the changing content of sin- 
gle words is to be regarded. 

Take, for example, the use of the word 
''God/' When Deborah praised the cruel 
treachery of Jael in her warrior's song, she 
used the word ''God/' When the priests in 
Leviticus indicated what they thought would 
be pleasing to the Almighty in the matter of 
elaborate ceremonies and bloody sacrifices, 
they used the word "God/' When Isaiah 
arraigned the people stricken for their moral 
blindness, calling upon them to forsake their 
reliance upon vain oblations and useless cere- 
monies in order to live in a new moral atti- 
tude where they would "cease to do evil and 
learn to do well," he used the word "God/' 
When Jesus spoke to the souls of men as 
never man spoke, bidding them find their 
highest self-realization by entering into filial 
relations with the Father, He employed the 
same term "God/' 

In our King James version the word is 
spelled throughout with the same three let- 
ters and is pronounced with .the .same vocal 
sounds, but the actual distance traversed in 
the essential meaning of the word in passing 
through those different periods which I have 



114 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

roughly indicated is almost immeasurable. 
Modern Biblical study brings this out more 
clearly and when once we enter into the spirit 
of it, we no longer think of Bible study as a 
field of inquiry standing apart. It is a field 
of intense and vital interest joining hard on 
to other fields of serious inquiry. It is a field 
where the principle of development and the 
general method of an organic evolution are 
constantly kept in view. It is a field where 
the same frankness, rigor, and thoroughness 
which belong to research in those other 
fields, are welcomed as men strive to know 
and to do the will of God. 

In the third place, the modern method of 
Bible study adds immeasurably to the human 
interest of the book. When once we think 
of the Bible, not as dropped down from the 
sky to become the priceless heritage of the 
race ; not as supernaturally dictated to chosen 
penmen who but dimly felt the significance 
of what they were transmitting; when we 
think of it as the patient record of what was 
once slowly wrought into the conscious expe- 
rience of gifted men as they faced duty, 
grappled with temptation, bore their heavy 
burdens, and entered at last into the high 



THE PRACTICAL USE OF THE BIBLE 115 

sense of spiritual privilege,— when once we 
think of the truths of the Bible as thus in- 
wrought in the experience of many men 
varying in temperament, in moral insight, 
and in spiritual development, we see how 
many more are the points of contact between 
this book and our own lives. 

When rightly studied the Bible has a face 
like our own face, the essential lines, fea- 
tures, and expressions of this modern life as 
we know it are suggested and reflected there 
as in a mirror. The Bible has a face like our 
own face, now clouded by defeat, now 
marred by passion, now shining with the 
sense of spiritual victory. 

The Bible has a hand like our own hand, 
capable of meeting ours in a genuine, sym- 
pathetic, and assuring clasp. It has a hand 
stretched out with an offer of help from a 
vantage ground gained through moral strug- 
gles similar to our own. 

The Bible has a voice like our own reach- 
ing us from lands and times and situations 
far removed, but none the less an intelligible 
and assuring voice. It has a voice which 
speaks somewhere to every man in the tongue 
in which he was born and in the very mood 



ii6 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

where he finds himself in his hour of moral 
need. It has a voice now broken with its 
sense of failure, and now ringing clear 
through the joy of spiritual advance, but it 
speaks to us steadily in recognizable accents 
a message from the Unseen. 

This is the sort of Bible study to which the 
young people of this generation are being 
invited. The whole method of modern criti- 
cism has helped to bring the Bible down out 
of the clouds where well-meant but unveri- 
fiable dogmas tended to remove it, and make 
is usefully at home among these oft recur- 
ring needs of men. 

The human touches in the Bible are all the 
more striking because of the literary habit 
of that oriental world. They loved the story, 
the parable, the warm, concrete picture 
rather than the colder, abstract form of 
statement. If the writers of scripture had 
all been born in New Hampshire, if they had 
gained their spiritual meat mainly from the 
perusal of John Calvin's ''Institutes,^' if they 
had belonged to a prosaic generation habitu- 
ated to the use of a literal, truth-telling 
kodak or of some phonographic record of 
every notable utterance; if, in a word, they 



THE PRACTICAL USE OF THE BIBLE 117 

had lived always in the white light of the 
absolute definite statement of truth, not half 
suspecting the lovely varieties of color lurk- 
ing in these common rays about us, we 
should have had a very different Bible but 
a very much less interesting and helpful one. 
Our task of interpretation might have been 
easier, but oh ! so much less rewarding. 

The human touches contained in these sug- 
gestive oriental pictures are the glory of it. 
The symbols and metaphors dealing with 
spiritual reality in poetic fashion have more 
value than many hard and fast statements 
of truth. The symbol is elastic ; it yields new 
and enlarging meanings to successive gen- 
erations of discerning minds and hearts as 
they, one after another, learn to behold its 
beauty. 

The old psalmist said, "I will say of the 
Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress : my 
God; in Him will I trust. Surely . . . He 
shall cover thee with His feathers, and 
under His wings shalt thou trust.'' 'Wings 
and feathers" belonging to the Divine Being! 
God shall cover thee with His feathers and 
under His wings shalt thou trust ! The idea 
would be startling and even grotesque had 



ii8 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

not familiarity with these phrases dulled our 
minds to the strangeness of them. Are we to 
think of the Almighty then as fashioned after 
the likeness of some gigantic winged creature 
of the sky? Not even the most conservative 
literalist would urge anything quite so ab- 
surd. It is free, bold, sensuous poetry urg- 
ing in downright human fashion a ready 
trust in that protecting care of which wings 
and feathers are the striking and beautiful 
symbols. 

We find an abundance of ''wings and fea- 
thers'' in holy writ. We find in the Old Tes- 
tament many books which are intensely 
human and of great value if these striking 
figures are correctly interpreted and given 
their appropriate setting. The book of 
Esther, containing nowhere a clear moral 
idea and not having in it from first to last 
even so much as the name of ''God," is none 
the less a most interesting human document 
showing as it does how in that far off time a 
woman's personal beauty and social charm 
entered into the shaping of events. The book 
of Proverbs is an intensely human book, in- 
dicating in its whole moral tone the progress 
of a shrewd worldly temper among the He- 



THE PRACTICAL USE OF THE BIBLE 119 

brews as they parted company with their 
greatest prophets and became the followers 
of a more material form of success. 

The book of Ecclesiastes is an intensely 
human composition showing the development 
of a cynical temper among those men who 
had become sated with success and pleasure. 
"That which befalleth the beasts befalleth 
the sons of men ; as the one dieth so the other 
dieth. Yea, they all have one breath so that a 
man has no preeminence above the beast, for 
all is vanity and all go unto one place." It 
would be difficult to find a more flat-footed 
denial of the truth of immortality or a more 
complete repudiation of the moral superi- 
ority of men to the beasts of the field than is 
here contained in holy scripture, but it all be- 
longs naturally to the history of that period 
as showing the prevailing temper of its 
everyday life. 

It is the office of modern Biblical study to 
indicate these various points of view, to char- 
acterize these different schools of opinion, 
and to locate them in the great historical 
process which brought them into being. And 
thus such study adds immensely to the human 
interest of the book and to its usefulness as 



I20 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

we come to apply its conclusions to the seri- 
ous business of living. 

In the fourth place, the modern method of 
Biblical study gives us a sense of perspective 
which aids greatly in placing our confidence 
in the unique service it can render on surer 
foundations. This sense of perspective a*ids 
us in offering the world with scriptural sanc- 
tion those moral and religious truths which 
the best reason and the best conscience of the 
time can consistently approve. And when 
once we cast in our lot with this method of 
study we find also abundant historical rea- 
sons for laying aside v/ith the most direct 
scriptural warrant certain theological views 
which have become more or less discredited 
on philosophical grounds. 

Let me illustrate this in a concrete way. 
The whole doctrine of atonement as under- 
stood for generations was based more largely 
upon the teachings of the book of Leviticus 
as to the efficacy of blood in propitiating the 
anger of an offended deity than upon the 
finer spiritual insight of the Second Isaiah 
or upon the matchless teachings of Christ 
Himself. Yet to-day we are made aware 
that the book of Leviticus is a somewhat nar- 



THE PRACTICAL USE OF THE BIBLE 121 

row-minded compilation of official directions 
for the use of the priests, and that it em- 
bodies only the limited and exclusive point of 
view of the ritualistic school of religious 
opinion. When scripture was scripture, no 
matter where found, no serious objection 
was made to the construction of a doctrine 
of moral reconciliation for use in a Christian 
dispensation from the material in that an- 
cient priestly document, but now with a more 
accurate appraisement of the book of Leviti- 
cus its value for the substitutional theory of 
the atonement or for any interpretation to 
be placed upon spiritual reality has, in the 
estimation of careful scholarship, undergone 
a very great change. 

The doctrine of evil was for centuries in 
Vhe minds of millions of Christians affected 
more by the story of the so-called ''fall of 
man,'^ as contained in the third chapter of 
Genesis, than by all the teaching of Christ in 
the four Gospels put together. Yet, as a mat- 
ter of fact, Christ delivered His entire message 
and made His full contribution to the world's 
store of moral truth without ever referring 
once in His recorded teachings to that narra- 
tive of the Garden of Eden. Indeed, after 



122 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

we leave the third chapter of Genesis with 
its story of the man and the woman and the 
forbidden fruit, we never find that narrative 
referred to again by any prophet or priest, 
by psalmist or historian, in all the Old Tes- 
tament. It is never referred to by Christ or 
utilized by any New Testament writer save 
Paul, who, briefly and by way of illustration, 
makes reference to it some three or four 
times. And the use of it as a sufficient ac- 
counting for the presence of moral evil in the 
world and as furnishing a kind of back- 
ground for the whole redemptive undertak- 
ing which culminated in the coming of 
Christ, is entirely without scriptural war- 
rant. 

You might call the roll of all the doctrines 
of religion and you would find that better 
methods of Bible study are setting them one 
after another in truer perspective, putting 
certain claims in the background where they 
may remain the objects of a genuine histori- 
cal interest, and bringing to the front those 
weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy, 
and truth, the great right things which are 
forever vital. 

This whole method leads to a more intelli- 



THE PRACTICAL USE OF THE BIBLE 123 

gent and verifiable appraisement of those 
varied sources. Thoughtful men have be- 
come impatient with the utterances of those 
religious promoters who like to say loudly, 
and sometimes fiercely, 'The Bible is the in- 
fallible word of God from lid to lid; we be- 
lieve every word and syllable of it/' Men 
have come to feel that such representations 
are made, not in the spirit of the love of 
truth, but in the spirit of the advertiser, con- 
scious all the while that he is claiming rather 
more for his wares than the facts actually 
warrant, but excusing himself on the ground 
that when the inevitable scaling down takes 
place in the minds of his customers, the net 
result will be approximately correct. 

Such an attitude must of necessity be an 
offense to Him who said, ''I am the truth; 
and ye shall know the truth, and the truth 
shall make you free.'' The sort of faith 
which undertakes to find in the Bible nothing 
erroneous, nothing defective, nothing out- 
grown by subsequent development, is not the 
faith once delivered to the saints for which 
we are earnestly to contend. It is a piece of 
unfounded arrogance which has caused, in 
my judgment, more unbelief ten times over 



124 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

than it has been able to cure. We shall best 
serve the cause of truth and the cause of 
righteousness by those methods of study 
which give us a correct perspective, return- 
ing to the history of theology those claims 
whose value belongs entirely to an earlier 
stage of development and bringing to the 
front those sublime verities which constitute 
the word of God to the present life of the 
race. 

If I may venture to return again to that 
vision of the seer, I believe that ''a little 
book" such as modern scholarship might well 
offer us, containing the more vital portions 
of the Bible and within the compass of the 
average interest, would have more worth for 
the layman than this entire literature of 
sixty-six books, varying as they do so greatly 
in value. The Bible has been hindered in its 
actual usefulness by the attempt to force the 
whole of it upon the attention of children and 
of busy adults. The Bible is not a single 
book, but a library of books, a national liter- 
ature. We do not think of turning an im- 
mature child out into the whole of English 
literature as soon as he knows his letters. 
Little books are provided for his advancing 



THE PRACTICAL USE OF THE BIBLE 125 

needs, first readers, second readers, third 
readers, making the way easier and more 
alluring by these progressive stages which 
serve to usher him into the presence of the 
vast Hterary treasures of the ages. 

In similar fashion, to turn a child loose in 
the whole Bible is to load him with questions 
and confuse him with problems for which his 
hour has not yet come. This course also bur- 
dens the parent or teacher with embarrass- 
ments needless to be borne. Here are the 
unclean stories of Lot and Samson and Ab- 
salom. Here are the shrewd, bitter, skepti- 
cal statements of the blase author of Eccle- 
siastes. Here are the cursing psalms where 
the writer blesses the man who will take the 
children of his enemy and dash their brains 
out on the stones. Here are all the imperfect 
moralities and crude attempts of those an- 
cient minds to fathom such moral mysteries 
as are suggested by the terms ''hell" and 
''devil." We do not wish to tell the children 
any lies and we are not prepared just yet to 
discuss these questions to the bottom with 
their immature minds. But when we under- 
take to teach the entire contents of this liter- 
ature to immature children, or to older peo- 



126 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

pie untrained in the science of interpretation, 
we speedily find ourselves thus embarrassed. 
A little book, then, or perhaps three little 
books, for home use and for general use by- 
all laymen, would be better than the entire 
literature contained in the sixty-six books. 
The first might contain the more wholesome 
stories of the Old Testament, some of the 
simpler psalms, and some selected passages 
portraying that moral heroism which wins 
a ready response from youth. The second 
might take up the narrative of the life of 
Christ with His deeds of love and His 
plainer teachings, leaving out of considera- 
tion for the time such passages as that which 
describes the cursing of the fig tree or the 
sending of the devils into the swine or the 
mysterious words about an unpardonable 
sin ; it might also contain some of the longer 
psalms and some of the finer chapters of the 
Epistles. The third book might contain more 
of the psalms, the best of Deuteronomy and 
Isaiah, and some of the splendid moral ap- 
peals from the other prophets: it might in- 
clude also the noble poem of the Creation and 
the best of the drama of Job, omitting por- 
tions of the long drawn out speeches of the 



THE PRACTICAL USE OF THE BIBLE 127 

three tiresome and mistaken men ; it might 
well contain a clear and connected narrative 
of the history of Israel and the main body of 
Christ's teachings, together with some of the 
greatest appeals of the Christian apostles as 
found in the Epistles. Three such little books 
made up of selections from the Bible, ar- 
ranged with some reference to their logical 
order and to the gradually unfolding needs 
of the moral life, would be more attractive 
and more useful to the average layman than 
the entire canonical scriptures of the Old and 
New Testaments in a single volume. 

The attempt to induce children or even 
adults to read the Bible through in course, so 
many chapters a day, as a kind of tour de 
force well pleasing to the Lord as would be 
some devout Moslem's pilgrimage to Mecca 
in the eyes of Allah, seems thoroughly un- 
wise. The ten 5^ear old boy who undertakes 
it may get on fairly well in Genesis and 
Exodus with their interesting narratives, 
wondering however at some of the strange 
recitals he encounters. He will have some 
dismal hours in the dull pedigrees where 
Abimelech begat somebody who in turn be- 
gat somebody else. But when he reaches 



128 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

Leviticus with its detailed directions as to 
how the priests were to prepare the sacrifices 
for the altar and carry on the elaborate ritual 
o£ worship in that far off land and time — a 
portion of scripture about as interesting and 
rewarding to a ten year old boy as would be 
an equal number of chapters from ^^Chitty on 
Pleading^^ — he will be inclined to give up 
once for all his attempt to read the Bible 
through from Genesis to Revelation. And 
he had better give it up. The Bible has many 
pages where the mind and the moral nature 
of a boy will respond, but he will not find 
them readily by taking the whole sixty-six 
books in course. He needs a little book in 
his hand, open. 

If a man were to start to walk across the 
continent from San Francisco to New York 
in course, twenty-five miles a day perhaps, his 
experience up through the Sacramento Val- 
ley would be thoroughly enjoyable. He 
would spend delightful days in the foothills 
around Auburn and Applegate. He would 
be uplifted and inspired as he reached the 
crest of the Sierra at Summit and as he 
passed on down the other side along the 
Truckee River. But when he got well out 



THE PRACTICAL USE OF THE BIBLE 129 

into Nevada the dull stretches of sage brush 
and alkali plain would be depressing. His 
twenty-five miles a day there would become 
dull, stale, and unprofitable. He might sup- 
pose that such a region had some place and 
use in the universe, but the meaning of it 
would be as completely hidden from the aver- 
age man as is the real worth of the book 
of Leviticus from the understanding of a 
healthy boy. The patient traveler wearied 
and bored would be inclined to turn back to 
California— and he had better turn back. 
In a complete account of the universe the al- 
kali plains and sage brush of Nevada would 
have to go in, but they do not furnish a re- 
warding place for ordinary people to go for 
a walk. 

In a complete account of the historical pro- 
cesses where lies embedded the revelation 
God has made to men in the Bible, those 
difficult, wearisome, and confusing sections 
would all have to go in. It is well for schol- 
ars to have the entire movement before them 
as it was, sage brush and all. But for ordi- 
nary uses, home use, devotional use, instruc- 
tional use,— as a place for the mind and 
heart to go and walk for fifteen minutes a 



I30 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

day — there are whole stretches of country 
which are not immediately available. A lit- 
tle book in the hand, open to every reader 
without reserve or apology or tiresome ex- 
planation, would be of more direct service. 

It is a practical question, not a sentimental 
one. How best can the literature here ready 
for our use be made to minister to the inner 
lives and spiritual unfolding of busy people ? 
Great sections of this literature are never 
read at all. Other considerable sections of it 
are never read with any great amount of 
edification. Many of the most familiar bat- 
tle-grounds in scripture, such as the narra- 
tive about Jonah, and the account of Joshua 
commanding the sun to stand still, and the 
story of the three men cast into the furnace 
of fire — many of these famous battle- 
grounds are upon soil which religious people 
rarely cultivate with seriousness and from 
which the spiritual harvests are habitually 
meager. 

It is for the men who know what they are 
about in theology and the men who know 
their way about in pedagogy to join hands 
and so bring the best of this literature to the 
attention of busy people, so relate it to their 



THE PRACTICAL USE OF THE BIBLE 131 

actual interest, and so induce them to make 
habitual use of it, that it shall in ever larger 
measure make them wise unto moral recov- 
ery and furnish them thoroughly with those 
reliable impulses and higher sanctions neces- 
sary for all good work. 



V 

FELLOWSHIP THROUGH SERVICE 

IN the art galleries and in stained glass 
windows we find Christ portrayed with a 
halo round His head. But the men who lived 
with Him and wrote the four Gospels never 
speak of any halo. They were simple, 
straightforward men and there was no halo 
there. It was more accurate to picture Him 
with loaves of bread in His hands feeding the 
hungry, or in the act of putting His hands 
compassionately on the eyes of the blind that 
they might receive sight, or as girded with a 
towel and with a basin of water in His hands 
that He might wash the feet of His disciples 
at the close of some long, exhausting day. 
He did not wear the peculiar halo of a sepa- 
rate and cloistered saintliness ; He wore the 
humbler badge of some useful form of ser- 
vice. 

The scene referred to, where He appears 
132 



FELLOWSHIP THROUGH SERVICE 133 

with a basin of water and a towel, is most 
instructive. The loose sandals worn in 
Palestine leave a large part of the foot bare 
and during the day sand or dust collects. It 
is the custom of the country to ofifer water 
and towels when any one enters a home. In 
the homes of wealth this is done by a servant. 

But Jesus and His friends were poor men. 
There was no servant at hand to perform 
that office when they met in the upper room. 
And when no one of the disciples volunteered 
to render this service to the Master and to 
the other disciples that evening at the last 
supper, Christ Himself rose from the table 
and did it. It was an act of simple kindliness 
performed for their physical comfort. 

But it was much more than that. The nar- 
rative in the synoptic Gospels indicates that 
on their way to the supper the twelve men 
had been disputing as to which one of them 
should be the greatest in the new kingdom 
they believed Christ was about to establish. 
Each one wanted to be Prime Minister or 
Chancellor of the Exchequer or to hold some 
conspicuous position. Each one desired that 
he might sit either on the right hand or on 
the left hand of autliority. And the twelve 



134 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

men had become warm and noisy in urging 
their selfish ambitions. The great ones 
among the Gentiles exercised dominion and 
these twelve Hebrews felt that they too 
should be princes and potentates in the com- 
ing kingdom. 

What could the Master do at the last sup- 
per with a group of men in that mood ! This 
scene, according to the narrative in the 
fourth gospel, immediately preceded the 
matchless discourse reported in the four- 
teenth chapter. Imagine His saying to men 
filled to the eyes with pride and jealousy, 'Tn 
my Father's house are many mansions. . . . 
I go to prepare a place for you.'' Pic- 
ture the effect of uttering in the presence 
of men fairly bursting with selfish ambition 
such a word as this, '''Greater love hath no 
man than this, that a man lay down his life 
for his friends. Ye are my friends, if ye do 
whatsoever I command you." Pearls before 
swine, would be putting it mildly ! Therefore 
He proceeded to wash their feet and by this 
action which spoke more effectively than 
words He also washed their minds and 
hearts, making them sufficiently clean to 
react under the message He had for them. 



FELLOWSHIP THROUGH SERVICE 135 

One man in the group protested. It was a 
natural, instinctive, honorable protest. The 
original brings the two terms of the contrast 
together and thus into bolder relief, ''Thou— 
My!'' ''Dost thou wash my feet?" It was 
unthinkable ! 

Then Christ said to this reluctant soul, "If 
I wash thee not thou hast no part with me.'' 
If He might not take upon His heart the 
needs of that other and weaker life, the 
deeper fellowship possible between them 
would be impeded. In the act of giving and 
of receiving service by a helpfulness which 
becomes reciprocal, the souls of men are knit 
together as by nothing else. 

Acts of kindness are tendered which can- 
not be declined without loss. If in some 
other way the child's need of food and 
raiment, of shelter and education could be 
supplied without calling upon the father and 
the mother, it would be a sore loss to them as 
well as to the child. It is blessed to give and 
under appropriate conditions it is also 
blessed to receive. The spirit of utter inde- 
pendence of all one's fellows is abnormal and 
blighting. We find that the hearts of those 
who are associated and organized for a com- 



136 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

mon service are by that relationship knit up 
into the finest form of fellowship known. If 
I serve not, I am cut off from fellowship with 
those whose needs I might meet and I am cut 
off as well from the fine fellowship of others 
who also serve. 

I wish to emphasize the mutuality of it. 
There are those who have learned to give but 
not to receive. They can serve but they show 
themselves ugly and repellent when a service 
they may sorely need is offered them. They 
stand ready to wash the characters of their 
neighbors with vigor and thoroughness, but 
are unwilling to have a like service rendered 
unto them though they too have faults abun- 
dant. The only lives which develop normally, 
becoming well-poised and serene, are those 
that learn the art of give and take. The 
weak need the kindly offices of the strong 
and the strong are no less dependent upon 
the presence of the weak for their full self- 
realization. The principle of reciprocity is 
vital to moral growth. 

"What a world it would be," I once heard 
a woman say, impatient under certain de- 
mands made upon her, '^if every one would 
only take care of himself, bearing his own 



^ .^M.:^a^.»-^..±^r^^.. 



FELLOWSHIP THROUGH SERVICE 137 

burdens, paying his own debts, overcoming 
his own temptations, without troubHng other 
people/^ What a world indeed — a world 
none of us would wish to stay in over night. 
We should have a world of self-sufficient, 
self-centered individuals standing apart in 
moral isolation, cold and unsympathetic as 
so many blocks of ice. What the poets have 
sung and the prophets have foretold is a 
kingdom ruled and welded into a whole by a 
sympathetic spirit. The social ideal which 
kindles our own hearts is that of a republic 
of souls free and brave but unified by the 
spirit of mutual helpfulness. We can only 
attain unto that by bearing one another's 
burdens in that mutuality of service which 
becomes the glorious fulfillment of the law of 
Christ. 

The utility of associated and organized 
eflPort is one of the most significant facts in 
this modern world. The presence of labor 
unions means that the individual working- 
man is no longer compelled to stand alone 
and helpless before his employer who may be 
a mighty corporation. By the principle of 
collective bargaining his personal interests 
are bound up in a common bundle with the 



138 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

interests of a thousand or of ten thousand of 
his fellows, and their united voice in any dis- 
puted question comes to be regarded. 

By this principle of association individual 
workingmen do not go about bidding the 
bread out of each other's mouths because of 
pressing personal necessity. The single man 
does not consent to a lower wage than the 
man with a family can afford to accept in 
order to get his job away from him. The man 
of phenomenal strength and endurance does 
not for the sake of currying favor with his 
employer, consent to a length of working day 
or to a pace in industry which the average 
man finds impossible. ''We stand together 
and bear one another's burdens in a mutu- 
ality of service," workingmen everywhere 
are saying, ''by this principle of associated 
effort." 

And the employers uniting in their agen- 
cies against frauds, against firms or indi- 
viduals who habitually fail to pay their bills, 
against fire and all the untoward incidents of 
commercial life are illustrating the same law 
of mutuality in service. Life insurance and 
fire insurance companies are organized ex- 
pressions of the fraternal spirit. The burden 



FELLOWSHIP THROUGH SERVICE 139 

of fire or of death does not fall upon a single 
group; it is shared by all those whose pay- 
ment of premiums has helped to create the 
fund out of which the loss is relieved. It is 
the law of life. No man should, and in the 
long run no man can, live unto himself. We 
are all by nature members one of another, 
and the highest self-realization can only come 
through the acceptance of that fundamental 
principle. 

Here we find the ultimate warrant for the 
organization of religious aspiration and ef- 
fort in what is known as "the church.'' We 
do not claim that some mysterious and saving 
potency resides in the very structure of these 
ecclesiastical institutions, actually determin- 
ing the eternal destiny of men as they become 
or fail to become enrolled members of the 
visible organization. The church, whatever 
name it bears— and I use the term here in 
the broadest sense as including the Protes- 
tant, the Catholic, and the Hebrew — is simply 
a certain section of the religious sentiment of 
the community organized and ready to take 
the field for needed action. 

There are those who say that they have no 
need of the church, that they can be religious 



I40 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

at home, quite apart from all public v/orship 

or organized effort. And having said this 

they commonly feel that they have dis- 

; charged their entire obligation toward or- 

I ganized religion. They could teach their 

I own children at home too, but on the whole 

: the public schools and the colleges do it better 

I for the community at large. Viewed solely 

j from the standpoint of personal interest, he 

I would be a foolish man who would turn away 

I from all schools and colleges, universities 

I and public libraries, on the ground that he 

could hammer out a bit of learning on his 

own little anvil at home. 

In the last analysis it is a practical ques- 
tion. How many of those people who do 
entirely dissociate themselves from the life 
of the church, habitually spend one hour a 
week in reading the Scriptures, in prayer or 
in direct and resolute attention to some fur- 
ther phase of Christian duty and privilege? 
The lack of fellowship in the life of aspira- 
tion commonly weakens the spirit of aspira- 
tion. The president of Bowdoin College 
states the principle clearly, 'The life of ser- 
vice revealed by Christ and begotten in us by 
the Spirit, demands a socially effective or- 



FELLOWSHIP THROUGH SERVICE 141 

ganization and expression that those who 
share this life may be bound closely together, 
that the enthusiasm o£ it may be kept alive, 
and that those who are losing it may be 
brought to share in its blessings and privi- 
leges/^ 

It is a distinct loss to any soul to lack this 
sense of union with the great body of aspir- 
ing men. It must be strange for any one 
to travel in Europe, visiting the mighty 
cathedrals reared by religious aspiration, 
studying the masterpieces of painting and 
sculpture wrought out under the stimulus of 
religious emotion, hearing the music of the 
greatest oratorios or the opera of Parsifal 
' with religion as their theme, and to feel 
throughout that he is a stranger and a for- 
\ eigner in that mighty kingdom where all this 
I was produced. He must be conscious that 
for some reason he has not become a natural- 
ized citizen with a recognized domicile in any 
one of the states which make up the republic 
of God, standing as it does for so much en- 
richment in the world's history. The noblest 
life cannot be lived thus detached. It needs 
to find institutional expression and institu- 
tional fellowship. The cultivation of spir- 



142 THE MODERN MAN^S RELIGION 

itual life entirely apart from any branch of 
the church, Protestant, Catholic, or Hebrew, 
is like the task of cultivating patriotism in a 
man who refuses allegiance to any country, 

I have listened reverently to the service of 
the Mass according to the Roman Catholic 
ritual in St. Peter's at Rome; I have heard a 
chorus of a hundred men chant the liturgy of 
the Greek Church in the Cathedral in the 
Kremlin at Moscow ; and I have heard a rude 
choir of Indian boys sing the old Gregorian 
chants in a Russian mission on the west coast 
of Alaska. I have heard the call to prayer 
from the minaret and have seen devout Mos- 
lems prostrate in worship in the Mosque of 
St. Sophia at Constantinople ; I have watched 
the tear-stained faces of devout Jews pour- 
ing out their hearts before that fragment of 
the old Temple enclosure at the Jew^s' Wail- 
ing Place in Jerusalem. I have seen the 
Buddhist priests leading -the worship of the 
Japanese in the great Hongwanji Temple at 
Kyoto ; and I have studied the stolid faces of 
the Chinese in their Joss Houses in old 
Shanghai. And although in every case the 
mode of worship and the language in which 
it was offered were utterly unlike my ow^n, 



FELLOWSHIP THROUGH SERVICE 143 

the essential spirit of what I saw in them all 
was akin to what I find in my own breast. 
In that common sense of dependence upon 
and of kinship with the Unseen, in that deep 
yearning and longing for a more effective 
sense of fellowship with the divine, we were 
all one. I shared with them all this wide- 
spread and persistent hunger of the heart. 
And the deepest instinct of my soul would 
impel me to seek admission into some branch 
of the church universal which organizes and 
socializes this aspiration. 

We have laid so much stress upon indi- 
vidualism in this new country of political 
equality and unparalleled personal oppor- 
tunity that we have only partially appre- 
hended the value of institutionalism. We are 
beginning to learn more fully that the indi- 
vidual only realizes himself through combi- 
nation with other individuals. 

When the Hebrews returned from Baby- 
lon and began to restore the walls of Jerusa- 
lem ''every man built over against his own 
house." He found his particular respon- 
sibility at his own door. But in meeting that 
particular responsibility he had a glad sense 
that the portion of wall laid up by his hands 



144 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

would help to guard the domestic and com- 
mercial interests of all the other men in the 
city. And his heart was reassured by the 
feeling that he in turn would enjoy a more 
complete safety consequent upon their efforts 
in wall building. 

It was this sense of connection with and 
of participation in a larger movement which 
uncovered to each individual Hebrew a 
deeper source of motive. When he took up 
his particular brick, the act seemed insignifi- 
cant — it was only a bit of burnt clay laid in a 
certain place. But when the brick went into 
a wall, relating itself to millions of other 
bricks, and when the completed wall sur- 
rounded a city as its main defense, and when 
that city was Jerusalem, the headquarters of 
the Hebrew people who have so effectively 
woven their history into the higher life of 
the world through their poets, their prophets, 
and their Messiah born in Bethlehem of 
Judea, then the simple act of that man taking 
a brick in his hand was clothed with a new 
significance. He found his own self-reali- 
zation, he found the deeper meaning of 
his individual acts, he found motive and 
stimulus prompting him to a finer fidelity in 
the discharge of his particular duty, as he 



FELLOWSHIP THROUGH SERVICE 145 

felt his own life organized with that of hun- 
dreds of other men in that vaster enterprise. 
The fact of organization makes the efforts 
of all and the efforts of each more effective, 
and it also develops a profomider sense of 
sympathy. We learn to keep step with the 
whole company marching in one direction 
under a common banner. Each man's cour- 
age is augmented as he touches elbows with 
his fellows and hears the tread of marching 
men conscious that he too is contributing to 
that combined result. Not even the personal 
assurance of divine help can take the place 
of that sense of reinforcement which comes 
when we see the look of interest in other 
faces like our own face and feel the hand 
clasp of personal fellowship which brings 
love within arm's length and becomes an 
earnest of the combined strength of that 
army of aspiring men with which we are 
allied. 

*' Who cares for the burden, the night and the 
rain. 
And the long, steep lonesome road. 
When at last through the darkness a light 

shines plain. 
When a voice calls ' Hail ' and a friend draws rein. 
With an arm for the stubborn load.*' 



146 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

*^ For life is the chance of a friend or two 
This side of the journey's goal. 
Though the world be a desert the long night 

through 
Yet the gay flowers bloom and the sky shows 
blue 
When a soul salutes a soul/' 

It is written that where two or three are 
gathered together in a certain name, that is 
to say in a certain high mood and for a cer- 
tain lofty purpose, reinforcements will come 
ensuring victory. ''Where two or three are 
gathered together in my name, there am I in 
the midst/' The claim is well supported by 
the facts of psychology as well as by the high 
assertions of theology. Powerful reactions 
come both perpendicularly and horizontally 
when men are banded together for worthy 
ends and these reinforcements become deci- 
sive. Each one feels and shares in the 
strength of the pack. 

By the association of efifort, individual 
energy is multiplied in a kind of geometrical 
ratio. ''One of you shall chase a thousand, 
and two shall put,'' not two thousand as we 
might naturally suppose but, "ten thousand 
to flight." This was the promise made of old 



FELLOWSHIP THROUGH SERVICE 147 

and it was no mere play upon words or the 
idle boast of an ungrounded enthusiasm. 
Any man lined up with other men for some 
exalted purpose, feeling in himself a gener- 
ous measure of their allied strength, per- 
suaded of ultimate victory all the more surely 
because of a certain contagion of courage, 
multiplies his own normal strength by five. 
Thus if one righteous man chases a thousand 
evil doers, two such men organized for ac- 
tion may put ten thousand to flight. It is 
significant that the original twelve apostles 
went out "two by two/^ This was fellowship 
in service reduced to its lowest possible 
terms, but it was far and away better than 
the loneliness of unorganized effort. 

In service there is also developed a new 
sense of fellowship with the divine. In the 
life of the One who stands as the supreme 
historical manifestation of what is godlike, 
the spirit of service is most conspicuous. 'T 
came not to do mine own will but His." 'T 
am among you as one that serveth.'' 'The 
Son of Man is come not to be served but to 
serve and to give his life for the moral re- 
covery of many." 

His standard of values was based alto- 



148 THE MODERN MAN^S RELIGION 

gether upon this principle of service. ''Among 
the Gentiles the great ones exercise domin- 
ion. It shall not be so among you. He that 
would be chief among you let him serve. 
The greatest of all is the servant of all." 
Usefulness is greatness and there is none 
other. 

It follows then inevitably that the direct 
pathway into fellowship with the divine lies 
along the line of useful service. The Master 
who made this word of service flesh, causing 
it to dwell among us full of grace and truth, 
identified Himself directly with the need of 
the world. He felt it so intensely and sym- 
pathetically as to make it His own. 'T was 
hungry and ye gave me meat. I was naked 
and ye clothed me. I was sick and in prison 
and ye visited me." He uttered these words 
not as a glowing figure of speech but as the 
sober statement of a fact of experience. And 
when men gave food to the hungry, raiment 
to the unclothed, and visited the lowliest of 
those who were sick or imprisoned, they 
were by those acts of kindness brought into 
immediate fellowship with Him. ^Inasmuch 
as ye did it unto the least of these, ye did it 
unto me." 



FELLOWSHIP THROUGH SERVICE 149 

In view of the fact that our highest con- 
ception of the divine shows a nature not 
standing apart in sacred majesty or in pas- 
sive contemplation of the world's pain, but in 
active and ceaseless ministry to its need, it 
is evident that we can best experience a sense 
of fellowship with the divine through loving 
service. Not in mystic contemplation or in 
strivings after spiritual ecstasies, but in the 
direct consecration of one's best powers to 
the meeting of human need do we best come 
to know the presence and the help of God. 
When any man undertakes to save his own 
soul by withdrawing from the ordinary secu- 
lar activities of the world lest he should be 
contaminated by evil, and spends his strength 
in seeking rapt communion with the Most 
High, he loses it. When any man goes into 
the thick of the fight and invests his life in 
heroic service to the point where he loses 
sight of his own immediate personal inter- 
ests, he finds his life and keeps it unto life 
eternal. 

The deeper understanding of the doctrine 
of atonement comes less by theological re- 
search than by the insight which springs 
from the life of devoted service. We may 



I50 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

be puzzled and confused by some of the 
learned efforts to accurately appraise and 
adjust the benefits of Christ's sacrifice of 
Himself, but as active participants in the 
work of moral recovery we find a truer 
method of interpretation/ ''Nothing short 
of this experience of earnest service and un- 
flinching sacrifice for the triumph of God's 
will and the good of man can interpret to us 
to-day the meaning of the sacrifice of Christ. 
Every man -who has tried to do these things 
in any degree knows full well that there can 
be no salvation either f romx sin or from the 
misery sin entails on guilty and innocent 
alike, save by the vicarious sacrifice of some 
brave, generous servant of righteousness and 
benefactor of his fellows. The doctrine of 
atonement is self-evident to every man who 
has ever fought intrenched and powerful evil 
or sought to rescue the wicked from their 
wickedness. While to those who have never 
touched the fearful burden of human sin and 
misery with so much as the tips of their 
dainty and critical fingers the doctrine of 
vicarious suffering, like all the deeper 
truths of the spiritual life, must remain 

1 " God's Education of Man.''— IVm, Dewitt Hyde. 



FELLOWSHIP THROUGH SERVICE 151 

forever an unintelligible and impenetrable 
mystery/' 

If any man will take upon his own heart 
his full share of the shame and the wrong in 
civic life, by seeking to have the principles of 
equity stand fast and bear rule, he will by 
that public spirited service be brought into 
such fellowship with the divine purpose as to 
understand sympathetically the deeper mean- 
'ing of life. If any pure-hearted woman will 
take upon her heart something of the burden 
of shame and sorrow which has fallen upon 
the less fortunate of her sex by defective 
training, by false social standards, and by 
the pressure of inequitable economic condi- 
tions quite as much as through their own 
evil choices, she will enter into the deeper 
meaning of redemption. If any of you shall 
go into unfavored communities and take 
upon your consciences a full measure of re- 
sponsibility for the lives which remain sordid 
and unaspiring through their lack of the 
ministry of education at its best, you will in 
that very task learn the method of moral re- 
covery through sacrifice. 

I have emphasized the high privilege of 
fellowship, human and divine, to be attained 



152 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

by unselfish service, because I wish to bring 
out the joy of Christian living under these 
modern conditions of thought and action. 
The medieval asceticism and religious morti- 
fication of the flesh were in the nature of a 
protest, a much needed protest it may be, 
against the untrammelled license and coarse 
indulgence of that period. But in the very 
nature of the case that mode of life could 
never be accepted as an ultimate ideal. 

^Tf thy right hand,'' the trained and choice 
faculty, "cause thee to stumble, cut it off.'' 
It is better to enter into life maimed than 
having two hands to make moral shipwreck. 
It is better to cut the hand off than to steal 
or to forge with it. It is better to pluck the 
right eye out than to look approvingly upon 
evil. It is better to cut the right foot off 
and sit down the rest of one's days or rely 
upon a crutch, than to walk with springing 
step in the path of wrong doing. ''Better"— 
aye, verily, amputation of faculty is better 
than degradation ! 

If the choice lay entirely between these 
two options then amputation of the various 
faculties and interests which cause men to 
stumble would be forever preferable to deg- 



FELLOWSHIP THROUGH SERVICE 153 

radation. But there is a third option— the 
best choice Hes in that course of action which 
leads to the consecration of these faculties 
and interests to worthy use, allowing them 
to find therein that full self-realization which 
is their salvation. Degradation, amputation, 
consecration — the second is always better 
than the first, but best of all is that conse- 
cration of faculty to worthy use which yields 
the full joy of Christian service. 

You will best construe the Christian life 
under modern conditions as you do it in 
terms of privilege rather than in terms of 
hard moral necessity. Christianity is not a 
new and more exacting set of rules than are 
found in the Ten Commandments. It is not 
a more searching system of ethics to become 
at once the allurement and the despair of our 
faulty moral natures. The Christian mes- 
sage is a gospel, a piece of good news, the 
announcement of privilege which stands be- 
fore us like a wide open door. 

And duty, under the Christian regime, is 
not a hard impersonal thing holding the 
moral nature as in a vise. Duty is the loving 
sense of compulsion from within which a 
man feels when in a filial spirit he recognizes 



154 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

that his interests and the Eternal Father's 
interests are all one. His sense of duty im- 
pels and permits him to say, ''I must be about 
my Father's business/' He asks nothing 
better than to share in the Father's work and 
to share in the ultimate reward of it. 

When we thus rightly conceive of it the 
pathway of duty is no longer a way of de- 
pressing and hopeless failure, consequent 
upon the gap between our highest ideals and 
our actual achievements. It becomes a way 
of gradual growth where a child by a regular 
organic process adds cubit after cubit to his 
moral stature, moving the while up toward 
the full expectation cherished on his behalf 
by a benign Father. We are being judged at 
this hour not by the measure of perfection 
we are able to show in our actual achieve- 
ments, but rather according to the purposes 
which have become fundamental and con- 
trolling in our lives, according to the long- 
ings and aspirations which furnish impulse 
for all our efforts. And therein lies the glo- 
rious liberty and surpassing joy of the chil- 
dren of God. 

Duty is privilege. Right character lies in 
the purpose to enter progressively into the 



FELLOWSHIP THROUGH SERVICE 155 

fulness o£ that privilege. And the highest 
reward for duty well done springs from this 
sense of personal participation in an august 
moral enterprise presided over by the Father. 

It was once my good fortune to hear Fred- 
erick W. Seward, who was Acting Secretary 
of State in April, 1865, during the illness of 
his father, William H. Seward, describe to a 
small group of friends the last Cabinet meet- 
ing which Lincoln attended. After the som- 
ber experiences through which they had been 
passing for four years this was a meeting of 
good cheer. Lee had surrendered and the 
terms offered him by General Grant had been 
approved. Sherman was pressing Johnson's 
army so close that its surrender seemed only 
a question of hours— and that would end the 
war. All the members of the Cabinet felt 
that a great load was being rolled away. 

When the business of the hour had been 
despatched, Lincoln walked to the window 
which looked toward the South as if he saw 
in a vision those scenes which had cost the 
nation so much blood and treasure. ''It has 
been a hard struggle,'' he said, half aloud 
and half to himself, ''but it is about over, 
thank God." The next night he fell by the 



156 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

hand of the assassin. And though his last 
hours were hours of physical distress and 
though the noble head was marred by a 
bullet-hole, there was a look of exaltation 
upon his face as he lay in state in the Capitol 
at Washington— Capitol still of the whole 
United States, his casket draped in the na- 
tional colors with all the stars together in 
one common field of blue and now too pure 
to float above a slave. There was that high 
look of exaltation upon his face as if he, too, 
through the faithful performance of duty, 
through the maintenance of the spirit of de- 
voted service, had entered fully into the joy 
of his Lord. 

The greatest thing which life does for any 
man is to cause him to love. Three things 
abide, faith, hope, love, and ^^the greatest of 
these is love.'' And we only learn to love as 
we learn to serve. 

On that road from Jerusalem to Jericho 
three men walked in a never-to-be-forgotten 
procession. The priest who came first was 
a man who preached about love. He knew 
that the first and great commandment in the 
law was 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
with all thy heart" and that the second was 



FELLOWSHIP THROUGH SERVICE 157 

like unto it, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as 
thyself/' But when he saw the wounded 
traveler at the roadside, bloody, dusty, and 
half-dead, the disagreeable task of doing 
something for his relief was too much for 
the priest. He passed by on the other side, 
showing that with all his beautiful talk he 
had not learned to love because he had not 
learned to serve. 

The Levite who came next was a singer. 
In the Temple service at Jerusalem he had 
sung anthems about love as sweet as the 
songs of the angels. And when he saw the 
wounded traveler he came and looked on him, 
but he too passed by on the other side. He 
could look down but he had not learned the 
high art of getting down to the place where 
he could render useful service — and thus he 
showed himself defective in love. 

But a certain Samaritan as he journeyed 
saw the wounded man and went to him, pour- 
ing in oil and wine— a little oil on the band- 
ages to make them soft, and a little wine 
down the sufferer's throat to revive him, for 
he was half-dead. He then got him up and 
set him on his own beast and took him to an 
inn and took care of him. This was love. 



158 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

This is the man whose portrait is held before 
us, and when we inquire as to what we shall 
do to inherit eternal life, we are bidden to 
"Go and do likewise/' The good Samaritan 
had learned to love without pretense because 
he had learned to serve. 

It is in this high privilege of service that 
we find the strongest motive impelling us to 
righteousness. The spirit of prudence, a 
wholesome regard for the approbation of 
others, the desire for one's own permanent 
well-being, all these deter men from evil and 
incite them to good. There is, however, a 
more powerful incentive than any of these 
considerations are able to furnish. From the 
upper room Christ looked out upon the pain 
and the evil of the world, and thinking of its 
sore need of such a life and of such service 
as it lay within His power to furnish. He 
named that motive which transcends all the 
rest. "For their sakes, I sanctify myself." 
He found in an intelligent social sympathy 
the deepest source of motive. He was moved 
from within to pledge Himself to the highest 
He saw by the fact that the world about Him 
needed that type of life beyond all else. For 
their sakes, I will live this life ! 



FELLOWSHIP THROUGH SERVICE 159 

It is a rrrotive which holds where other 
motives fail, both as a deterrent from evil 
and as an incentive to right. When you ap- 
peal on the ground of self-interest, you may 
tell some man that if he lives an evil life he 
will go to hell when he dies. He may laugh 
in your face and tell you that he does not 
believe there is any such place — and you can- 
not instantly demonstrate to him the sound- 
ness of your claim. You may urge him to 
become a Christian on the ground that his 
refusal will entail upon him a certain loss to 
his inner and finer nature. With a shrug of 
his shoulders he may inform you that this is 
his own affair, that if he does suffer loss he 
will bear it like a man and not whine. 

But let such a man really feel that the well- 
being of other lives is at stake in the course 
of action he elects — and no man stands so 
isolated from other lives he could serve but 
that this is true — and you have a new and 
more powerful lever to pry his reluctant con- 
science into action. Let him feel that some 
one, a mother, a wife, or a child, a friend, a 
neighbor, or a pupil, will suffer loss and hurt 
if he turns from the higher to the lower and 
he will feel the force of those considerations 



i6o THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

which spring into being because of the 
capacity each man has to serve the lives of 
others. He may fling away his own chance 
but the thought of flinging away that portion 
of their chance to reach the best, for which 
he stands responsible, gives him pause. 

Here we find the mightiest of all deter- 
rents against the coarser vices. Gambling, 
drunkenness, and licentiousness are only pos- 
sible in the absence of any genuine social in- 
terest. In gambling the pleasure of one 
man's gain is always purchased at the pain 
of another's loss. In legitimate business it 
is not so. When I buy a suit of clothes from 
the tailor we are both profited. I would 
rather have the suit than the money for I 
cannot go about the streets dressed in a few 
bank notes. He would rather have the money 
than the suit for he cannot eat his cloth. But 
in gambling, the low grade of pleasure in 
one's own gain is always purchased at the 
cost of another's pain in losing. 

In the vice of drunkenness the tippler must 
be made to see that the tickling of his own 
stomach, the warmth and glow and exhilara- 
tion which intoxicants bring, are all pur- 
chased by the loss and pain which must come 



FELLOWSHIP THROUGH SERVICE i6i 

upon those whose Hves are intimately bound 
up with his own, through his lack of self- 
control. 

And in social impurity the man who for 
an hour of guilty gratification is willing to 
become one of a class of men who doom a 
company of weak, vain, misguided girls to a 
degradation no man would choose for his 
own daughter or sister, who sentence them 
to a swift and terrible descent into physical 
and moral hell— the man who pretends to 
find pleasure in that is lower than the canni- 
bal or the beast. The cannibal and the hyena 
mar and eat only the bodies of their victims, 
while this devilish contempt for the interests 
of another life mutilates the mind and heart 
as well. 'Tor their sakes, even more than 
for my own sake," the decent man says, ''I '11 
none of it." The appeal to high school fel- 
lows and to college men for clean living can 
be best made when the form of motive is thus 
socialized. 

This fine bit of moral experience came un- 
der my notice not long ago in my own city in 
California. There was a mother who had 
undergone a capital operation. She did not 
rally afterward; the loss of blood and the 



i62 THE MODERN MAN^S RELIGION 

nervous shock of it brought her to the very- 
verge of death. The surgeons in consulta- 
tion decided that she could not possibly re- 
cover unless something radical was done at 
once, that indeed her only hope lay in the 
transfusion of blood from some healthy, 
vigorous nature. 

The mother had three sons, great, strapping 
fellows in the heyday of their youth. They 
at once offered themselves. The surgeons 
examined them to see which one would be 
the best subject for that critical undertaking. 
The examination showed them all sound, 
clean, and abundantly alive. They were 
weighed in the balance of severe medical 
scrutiny and they were not found wanting. 
Any one of the three would meet the test. 
If one of them had been tainted by some 
wretched vice, if his vitality had been low- 
ered by some wicked indulgence, he would 
have been cut off from the chance of render- 
ing that high service to the mother in her 
hour of need. One of them was selected and 
the artery of strength was connected with 
the veins of weakness, and then the heart of 
the young man, clean in every sense of the 
word, pumped into that life, which trembled 



FELLOWSHIP THROUGH SERVICE 163 

on the brink, a fresh store of vitaHty. By 
this transfusion of blood the mother's life 
was saved and restored. 

What a glorious privilege to be able to 
show oneself fit to meet the demands of any 
exacting service. For her sake, for the sake 
of that other life which I may be able to 
save in some crisis, physical, intellectual, or 
moral, I will live the life myself! It fur- 
nishes the strongest form of motive in the 
moral field. 

The song of trust and of aspiration has 
been hushed in many hearts these days by 
the changing conditions of religious belief. 
When some man believed in an infallible 
church or in an infallible book or in some 
system of doctrine implicitly accepted, faith 
was easy and he found himself singing. But 
the study of history and of science, of liter- 
ature and of philosophy, has changed all this 
for the man of intelligence. He can no 
longer take his faith upon the authority of 
another. He feels impelled to work out his 
own theological salvation with fear and 
trembling. And because the task is hard he 
often feels that he cannot sing the Lord's 
song in this strange land. 



i64 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

Not only changes in theological belief but 
a changed attitude in regard to man^s moral 
freedom has a tendency to silence the song. 
"Heredity and environment have us bound 
hand and foot/^ men are saying. Man does, 
not as he chooses, but as he must. Whatever 
is, had to be and whatever will be, will be, 
whether we like it or not. This gloomy, pes- 
simistic determinism is not confined to the 
dark closets of a few philosophers; it is 
boldly preached from the housetops and on 
the street corners. When men thus feel 
themselves a part of that which is nothing 
more than mechanism, the song of hope is 
hushed. 

And the song of aspiration has been si- 
lenced in other hearts by the changing and 
advancing ideals in the world of industry. 
It is being insisted upon, man- fashion, that 
fortunes shall be won as well as spent or 
given away by methods which harmonize 
with the higher ideals in life. It was a clever 
paraphrase which said, ''A new command- 
ment give I unto you that ye remember the 
week day to keep it holy.'' It seems impos- 
sible to many people to reconcile Christian 
ethics with the present economic conditions 



FELLOWSHIP THROUGH SERVICE 165 

under which we are compelled to live. And 
because they are unwilling to sing on Sunday 
what they do not see their way clear to prac- 
tice on Monday, they declare their inability 
to sing the Lord's song in such a strange 
land. 

What shall we say in the face of it all? 
The task of keeping the faith and of singing 
the song of trust has become undoubtedly 
a different and a harder task. The changed 
religious beliefs of the people, the new psy- 
chology making this human nature of ours 
seem a more complex affair, the emergence 
of more exacting ideals in the world of in- 
dustry will of necessity modify the song. 

But all this need not, it must not, drown it. 
The finer discrimination in matters of belief, 
the deeper sense of all that is involved in this 
mysterious thing we call personality, and the 
moral heroism demanded in undertaking to 
make the six days of labor as holy as the 
seventh day of rest and worship, all this will 
only serve to bring out new notes and finer 
accents in the song of the higher life. The 
very difficulty and vastness of the undertak- 
ing will serve to make the ''attack'' of the 
singers more sharply defined and will add 



i66 THE MODERN MAN'S RELIGION 

richness and impressiveness to the final vol- 
ume of praise rising from the lips of men 
devoted to this bolder enterprise. The song 
of aspiration will be sung in this changed 
land and the music of it will help to make it 
the Lord's land. It will be sung from throats 
attuned to these richer harmonies and from 
hearts inspired by the wider vision of pos- 
sible achievement. Thus through the joy 
and fellowship of this broader service men 
will enter more deeply into that form of 
satisfaction worthy to be called ^'the joy of 
their Lord.'' 










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